Question

I have a Spring MVC application and I am wondering how to successfully map multiple, dynamic form elements with the same name in my JSP page to my object class. For example:

In my locations.jsp page, I have multiple dropdown boxes:

<form id="tabs-3-form">
    <input id="locations-1" name="location" />
    <input id="locations-2" name="location" />
    <input id="locations-3" name="location" />
    ... (more can be added or deleted dynamically by user)
</form>

I’m using jQuery to POST the form to my controller:

$("#tabs-3-form").submit(function() {
    $.ajax({
        type: 'POST',
        url: '/searchResults',
        data: $(this).serialize(),
        dataType: 'json',
        success: function(data) {
           ...
        }
    });
    return false;
});

My LocationsController.java is set up as follows:

@RequestMapping(value = "/locationResults", method = RequestMethod.POST)
public @ResponseBody LocationsCollection locationsCollection
(
    @ModelAttribute(value = "location") Location location,
    BindingResult result
) 
{   
    LocationsCollection locationsCollection = new LocationsCollection();
    locationsCollection.addLocation(location);

    // Anything else to do here?

    return locationsCollection;
}

LocationsCollection.java just contains a List of Location objects.

Do I need to add brackets to the names of my input fields? Will MVC automatically do the mapping to a List, as it does with the other form elements? If anyone could provide an example, I’d appreciate it.

Answer 1

I was able to get it working by following the example from: http://lifeinide.blogspot.com/2010/12/dynamic-forms-lazylist-and-transparent.html?showComment=1355160197390#c6923871316812590644

I did make one adjustment, however. For the form names, I used:

<input name="locationList[0].locationName" />

instead of what the article suggests:

<input name="myFormObject.elements[0].property" />