Question

I’m updating code in an old Java application at work but I’m pretty new to Struts 1 and I was wondering what the framework does when it see’s a null value in a form that’s trying to be accessed by the JSP?

• Does it convert null to the string null?
• Or does it leave the field in the JSP blank?
• Or does it fall over and fail?

Thanks for any insight into this,

Alexei Blue.

Answer 1

I assume your question is related to the null handling behavior in Struts 1 tags. Most of these tags will throw a RuntimeException if one of their supplied arguments is null, but you can often override this behavior by setting their ignore attribute to false. Here is an example using bean:write:

<bean:write name="employee" property="firstName" ignore="true"/>

In this case a blank field will be written if the employee bean is null.

You can also test for null values explicitly using logic:notEmpty.