Question

I did a bit of searching, and it doesn’t appear that this specific question has been asked (if I am mistaken, I apologize).

The application I’m working on processes reports on a set of data, and the reports are separated by client and the report category.

The issue I have is that the number of clients and categories varies for each job, so I need to dynamically generate the following form elements based on the requirements for each job.

<!-- CLIENT NAME -->
Inclusion Client Name:
    <form:errors path="clientName"  cssClass="error"/><br />
    <form:input path="clientName" />       
<br /><br />

<!-- REPORTING CCATEGORIES -->
Reporting Categories:
    <form:errors path="reportingCategories"  cssClass="error"/><br />
    <form:input path="reportingCategories" />       
<br /><br />
<!-- comma separated list of categories -->

In the process of testing some theories, I learned that you can point multiple form elements to the same path, and Spring will concatenate the values into a comma separated list. My only concern is the order in which these form elements are read.

<!-- CLIENT NAME A -->
Inclusion Client Name:
    <form:errors path="clientName"  cssClass="error"/><br />
    <form:input path="clientName" />       
<br /><br />

<!-- REPORTING CATEGORIES A -->
Reporting Categories:
    <form:errors path="reportingCategories"  cssClass="error"/><br />
    <form:input path="reportingCategories" />       
<br /><br />
<!-- comma separated list of categories -->

<!-- CLIENT NAME B -->
Inclusion Client Name:
    <form:errors path="clientName"  cssClass="error"/><br />
    <form:input path="clientName" />       
<br /><br />

<!-- REPORTING CATEGORIES B -->
Reporting Categories:
    <form:errors path="reportingCategories"  cssClass="error"/><br />
    <form:input path="reportingCategories" />       
<br /><br />
<!-- comma separated list of categories -->

In the second code snippet above, my test case reads CLIENT NAME A before CLIENT NAME B (Essentially working down the page from top to bottom). Will this always be the case?

Answer 1

Yes, the order will always be the order in which the form fields are defined in the form.

When defining multiple fields with the same path, you also can bind them as an array in your request method like:

@Controller
public class YourController {
    @RequestMapping(....)
    public String foo(@RequestParam String clientName[], @RequestParam String reportingCategories[], BindingResult result) {
        ...
    }
}