Question

In my controller:

@Controller
public class UserController {

    @RequestMapping(value="/admin/user/id/{id}/update", method=RequestMethod.GET)
    public ModelAndView updateUserHandler(@ModelAttribute("userForm") UserForm userForm, @PathVariable String id) {

        Map<String, Object> model = new HashMap<String, Object>();
        userForm.setCompanyName("The Selected Company");
        model.put("userForm", userForm);

        List<String> companyNames = new ArrayList<String>();
        companyNames.add("First Company Name");
        companyNames.add("The Selected Company");
        companyNames.add("Last Company Name");

        model.put("companyNames", companyNames);

        Map<String, Map<String, Object>> modelForView = new HashMap<String, Map<String, Object>>();
        modelForView.put("vars", model);

        return new ModelAndView("/admin/user/update", modelForView);
    }
}

The select form field in my view:

<form:form method="post" action="/admin/user/update.html" modelAttribute="userForm">
<form:select path="companyName" id="companyName" items="${vars.companyNames}" itemValue="id" itemLabel="companyName" />
</form:form>

It was my understanding that the form backing bean would be mapped based upon the modelAttribute attribute in the form. I’m obviously missing something here.

Answer 1

It appears the issue was not related to my setup. The problem was that the itemValue was set to the company id property, while the comparison was being done to the company name property on my form backing bean. So the two were not equal, and therefore, no item was set to selected.

The above code works just fine, and setting the value in the userForm for a particular property will set that value as selected in select form fields so long as the value of one of the items in the items collection is equal to the form value. I changed my form field to look like this, which pulls the companyName instead of the id.

<form:form method="post" action="/admin/user/update.html" modelAttribute="userForm">
<form:select path="companyName" id="companyName" items="${vars.companyNames}" itemValue="companyName" itemLabel="companyName" />
</form:form>