Question

Is there anyway to validate a collection of objects in a myAction-validation.xml file?

I have some JSP:

<s:iterator value="messageTypes" status="status">
<tr>
   <td> <s:property value="messageType" /> </td>
   <td> <s:checkbox name="messageTypes[%{#status.index}].enabled" value="enabled" label="" /> </td>
   <td> <s:textfield name="messageTypes[%{#status.index}].reminderDate" value="%{reminderDate}" label="" labelSeparator="" /> </td>
   <td> 
       <s:select name="messageTypes[%{#status.index}].reminderHour" list="hours" label="Hour"  /> 
       <s:select name="messageTypes[%{#status.index}].reminderMinute" list="minutes" label="Minute" /> </td> 
   <td> <s:textfield name="messageTypes[%{#status.index}].reminderTo"                           value="%{reminderTo}" label="" labelSeparator="" /> </td>
</tr>
</s:iterator>

And would like to validate the individual fields, like reminderDate with date validation for example. Is this possible? Note, all of the fields are Strings apart from enabled which is a boolean.

Answer 1

I think you’ll have to either apply validation on your MessageType class itself using the visitor field validator (see also: visitor validator). Alternately you could do the validation by overriding validate() in your Action (so long as you extend ActionSupport) and manually invoking addActionError or addFieldError.