unable to submit form data using form:input - spring-mvc

Question

I'm using Spring 3 MVC(3.0.1 Release). I have a bean class Customer and a CustomerForm class as shown below.
public class Contact {
private String firstname;
private String lastname;
private String email;
private String phone;
//getters and setters
}
public class ContactForm {
private List<Contact> contacts;
//getters and setters
}
From Spring Controller I'm populating the contacts and setting it to Model as shown below
private static List<Contact> contacts = new ArrayList<Contact>();
static {
contacts.add(new Contact("Barack", "Obama", "barack.o#whitehouse.com", "147-852-965"));
contacts.add(new Contact("George", "Bush", "george.b#whitehouse.com", "785-985-652"));
contacts.add(new Contact("Bill", "Clinton", "bill.c#whitehouse.com", "236-587-412"));
contacts.add(new Contact("Ronald", "Reagan", "ronald.r#whitehouse.com", "369-852-452"));
}
#RequestMapping(value = "/get", method = RequestMethod.GET)
public ModelAndView get() {
ContactForm contactForm = new ContactForm();
contactForm.setContacts(contacts);
return new ModelAndView("add_contact" , "contactForm", contactForm);
}
In JSP I'm displaying it as editable form as below,
<form:form method="post" action="save.html" modelAttribute="contactForm">
<table>
<tr>
<th>No.</th>
<th>Name</th>
<th>Lastname</th>
<th>Email</th>
<th>Phone</th>
</tr>
<c:forEach items="${contactForm.contacts}" var="contact" varStatus="status">
<tr>
<td align="center">${status.count}</td>
<td><form:input path="contacts[${status.index}].firstname"/></td>
<td><form:input path="contacts[${status.index}].lastname"/></td>
<td><form:input path="contacts[${status.index}].email" /></td>
<td><form:input path="contacts[${status.index}].phone"/></td>
</tr>
</c:forEach>
</table>
<br/>
<input type="submit" value="Save" />
</form:form>
If i'm making modification to the contacts and submiting it the values are not set to the model. But instead of using Spring JSTL if i use plain HTML input tags as shown below the values are getting set to model.
<c:forEach items="${contactForm.contacts}" var="contact" varStatus="status">
<tr>
<td align="center">${status.count}</td>
<td><input name="contacts[${status.index}].firstname" value="${contact.firstname}"/></td>
<td><input name="contacts[${status.index}].lastname" value="${contact.lastname}"/></td>
<td><input name="contacts[${status.index}].email" value="${contact.email}"/></td>
<td><input name="contacts[${status.index}].phone" value="${contact.phone}"/></td>
</tr>
</c:forEach>
When I checked the rendered JSP's HTML source from the browser, I could find a difference in the input control name's as below
//JSP
<form:input path="contacts[${status.index}].firstname"/>
//corresponding HTML not working
<input id="contacts0.firstname" name="contacts0.firstname" type="text" value="Barack"/>
//JSP
<input name="contacts[${status.index}].firstname" value="${contact.firstname}"/>
//corresponding HTML working!
<input name="contacts[0].firstname" value="Barack"/>
Is this a known issue or is there something I'm missing?
Regards,
Makesh.

Answer 1

You can directly use name attribute in the form:input tag like below,it may work.
<td><form:input name="contacts[${status.index}].firstname" path="contacts[${status.index}].firstname"/></td>