Submitting the value in the property tag to the action form

Question

The JSP:

<s:form action = "addfriend">
  <s:property value="Username" />
  <s:submit value="Add friend" />
</s:form>

Does this code submit the value in the <s:property> tag to the action form?

Answer 1

No, <s:property> tag doesn't generate input fields. Merely description of the <s:property> tag you can find here. It's used to print the value from the value stack to JSP output. To submit the value to the action the form needs to have a tag which generate a HTML <input> tag or <textarea> tag. That's what the <s:textfield> tag provides.

<s:textfield name="Username" value="%{Username}"/>

Note, there are many other tags that generate input fields, you can see the output generated in HTML browser source window.

Answer 2

If you need to send a value that is displayed through s:property, simply add an s:hidden field to it:

<s:form action = "addfriend">
    <s:hidden    name = "Username"   />
    <s:property value = "Username"   />
    <s:submit   value = "Add friend" />
</s:form>

Remember, if a tag doesn't have the name attribute, it won't be posted to the Action.

Also avoid variables starting with an uppercase letter: username would be mapped to setUsername and getUsername, but Username could create problems, and is not standard.

Answer 3

As already pointed by @Roman, here's the code :

You can do :

<s:form action="addfriend">
      <s:textfield name="Username"/>
      <s:submit value="Add friend" />
</s:form>