Spring MVC Form submission binding against dynamic nested properties

Question

I am out of ideas and turning to the community experts. I am using Hibernate Single table inheritance which is driving me in this direction.

I have a BaseEntity class with many Subclasses using a Discriminator. I am using Spring MVC annotated controllers for the CRUD operations and JSPs using Spring form tags for the view.

I have a backingForm which includes the subclassed entities that the form uses. To save a ton of duplicate code I have a common.jsp that contains the fields in the BaseEntity and then other JSPs specfic to each subclasses.These other JSPs include the common.jsp. I am able to display the data fine by looknig at a pathVariable and then loading the proper subclass, adding it to the form. Form submission and Spring's DataBinding has got me reeling. Can any suggest a good way to allow for Spring to dymanically post to a specific nested property. Think about it like using polymorphism on a form submission. I know the may seem confusing, but idf anyone has ever tried this it should make perfect sense :-). This is not about dynamic list binding (AutoPopulating) this is very different.

Thanks for any insight at all.

Affe · Accepted Answer · 2012-04-19 17:50:58Z

1

Within your annotated controller you can do as a separate method:

@ModelAttribute("backingObject")
public SuperClass getBackingObject(HttpRequest request //etc) {
  //determine value of your path variable
  //create appropriate subcass
  return subClassInstanceForBinding;
}

So then when spring goes to bind it will find "backingObject" in the model map that you put there and use it, rather than looking for a constructor.

answered Apr 19, 2012 at 17:50

Affe

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user943583 Over a year ago

Thanks. I will look into doing this. Also, I think I may have found another way by using a variable in spring's form tag. I can use the forms's tag "path" with a variable like this: <form:input path="${someVariable}.field" />. THis allows dymanic binding. I am seeing some early success so far.

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