Question

I’m using Spring. I’ve got a JSP with a form:select in it displaying the list of users. In this situation the username or id won’t mean much to the user so I need to show firstname lastname.

I’ve tried:

<form:select id="userSelect" name="userId" path="user.id">
    <option value="">Select to Edit</option>
    <form:options items="${user.userList}" itemValue="id" itemLabel="lastname firstname" />
</form:select>

But that gives me a big error. How can I make the itemLabels show lastname, firstname?

Answer 1

I don’t think so. Either have a getFullName() getter in your object returning the concatenation of last and first names, or display the options one by one, in a loop:

<form:select id="userSelect" name="userId" path="user.id">
    <option value="">Select to Edit</option>
    <c:forEach var="theUser" items="${user.userList}">
        <form:option value="${theUser.id}"><c:out value="${theUser.lastname} ${theUser.firstname}"/></form:option>
    </c:forEach>
</form:select>

With concatenation performed by user.getFullName():

<form:select path="user"
   items="${user.userList}"
   itemValue="id"
   itemLabel="fullName">
</form:select>