Question

I have a simple contact form in my spring project, which is meant to access a backing object, but I get this error

“Neither BindingResult nor plain target object for bean name ‘indexBacking’ available as request attribute”

My form looks like this:

<form:form action="index.htm" enctype="multipart/form-data" method="post" commandName="indexBacking" accept-charset="UTF-8">
    <form:label path="personName">Name</form:label>
    <form:input id="personName" path="personName" autocomplete="false" /><br />
    <form:label path="personEmail">Email</form:label>
    <form:input id="personEmail" path="personEmail" autocomplete="false" /><br />
    <form:label path="personComments">Your Comments</form:label>
    <form:input id="personComments" path="personComments" autocomplete="false" /><br />
    <input type="submit" alt="Submit"/>
</form:form>

Which is meant to access my controller and save the fields “personName”, “personEmail” and “personComments” into my backing object called “indexBacking”.

My controller method that I am trying to access is here:

@RequestMapping(value = PAGE_NAME, method = RequestMethod.POST)
public String handleContactForm(ModelMap map, HttpServletRequest request, @ModelAttribute("indexBacking") IndexBacking bo, BindingResult result) {  
    return MODEL_NAME;
}

But I am not sure hot it links with the backing object. Any ideas what I am doing wrong?

Thanks
Jon

Answer 1

The problem was very simple, I was just being an idiot. I saw a colleague of mine working on a form and assumed a few of his classes were part of Spring as default. All I had to do was handle the received data at the other end properly (by calling the appropriate methods in the controller) and it worked fine.

Thanks for your help chaps – credit to @nobeh for pointing me in the right direction.