Spring MVC form tag library and template support

ehauser — Thu, 03 May 2007 00:41:33 +0000

A really useful UI feature of Webwork (now Struts 2) was templates. ASP.NET also provides similar functionality through CSS Control Adapters.Templates allow you to customize the HTML output by the form tag libraries. This feature was really useful for my development team because it allowed everyone to generate accessible (508 compliant) HTML for forms without having to know anything about accessibility. Just implement the templates once and make sure the whole team uses the accessible theme.

Spring MVC has the idea of themes, but does not allow for customizing the HTML output by the form tags. I created an issue in Spring JIRA describing what should be included in the feature. Templates would be a nice addition, but I would settle for a hook to provide custom HTML. A template mechanism could be implemented if that functionality is added.

If you are reading this, vote for the feature.

Unit Testing SimpleFormController

ehauser — Wed, 02 May 2007 02:26:01 +0000

I could not find this very easily searching Google. At first, I figured you could just set the formSubmission property to true but it is a read-only property. I ended up checking out AppFuse’s source code because I figured the solution would be there. It was a good guess. The trick is to make sure your MockHttpServletRequest is a POST when testing a form submission. Seems kind of obvious now =).

request = new MockMultipartHttpServletRequest(); request.setMethod(WebContentGenerator.METHOD_POST);

Eric Hauser's Blog » Spring

Spring MVC form tag library and template support

Unit Testing SimpleFormController