Question

In my MVC controller I have a handler method with a signature:

public void myAction(ActionRequest request, ActionResponse response, Model model) {...}

And in this method I check if some submitted data is okay. If it’s not valid, I want to set an error. Currently I do it this simple way:

model.addAttribute("operationStatus", "error");
model.addAttribute("operationMessage", "a lot of things went wrong");

and in the view JSP:

<c:if test="${requestScope.operationStatus == 'error'}">
    <div class="msg-error">${requestScope.operationMessage}</div>
</c:if>

Surely there has to be a better way to handle errors in Spring Portlet MVC. Note that I need to display the error messages in different places, not only in <form> tag.

So how should I handle errors?

Answer 1

If you’re targeting just Liferay, then you can use the SessionErrors class so you can do the following:

SessionErrors.add(actionRequest, "some-error");

Then on your JSP you have:

<%@ taglib uri="http://liferay.com/tld/ui" prefix="liferay-ui" %>
<liferay-ui:error key="some-error" message="Your error message goes here!" />

You can also use do this with exceptions. Check out my answer here.