Question

I have integrated Spring Security in my application , and would like to display an error message to the user in case of Bad credentials.

I have wired everything in to display the message , but it does not work. Please find the code snippets below

spring-security.xml

<form-login
            login-page="/spring/login"
            authentication-failure-url="/spring/login?error=true"               
            default-target-url="/spring/index"/>

<authentication-manager>
    <authentication-provider user-service-ref="customService">
    </authentication-provider>
</authentication-manager>

CustomService implements UserDetailsService , and in the loadUserByUsername method , i am returning the Spring UserDetails object which contains the details of the user.

My Controller looks as follows

@RequestMapping(value="/login", method = RequestMethod.POST)
    public String getLogin(@RequestParam(value="error", required=false) boolean error, 
            ModelMap model){

        if (error == true) {
            // Assign an error message
            model.put("error", "You have entered an invalid username or password!");
        } else {
            model.put("error", "");
        }


        return "loginpage";
    }

My loginpage contains the following div to paint the error

<div id="login-error">
        <c:if test="${not empty param.error}">
            Your login attempt was not successful, try again.<br />
        </c:if>
</div>

When I enter wrong credentials , it is redirected to the login page, but the message is not being displayed.

Please help and correct me if I am doing anything wrong.

Answer 1

Issue Resolved.

The real reason for the error message not being painted was that the ${not empty param.error} was not being evaluated.

To fix this issue , modified my web.xml to conform to the Servlet 2.5 Spec. and it worked like a charm. 🙂

Please refer my post on changing the Servlet Spec to v2.5

Issue with evaluating ${error} in Spring

Hope this helps all those who might face this issue.