Display actual value in validations

[Darien Cheung]

If I wanted to display the actual value that is causing a Struts validator to fail, how would I do this? For example, if I use the depends="email" rule, and I have:

errors.email={0} is not a valid email address

as my error message resource, how can I pass the actual text value into the message?

<arg0 key=" ...? " resource="false"/> but what should go into to key? ${field.value} ?

Thanks.

[Purushoth Thambu]

validator cannot be configured to display the actual value. You may have to generate the javascript and modify it to show the value. html:javascript doc
says

The dynamicJavascript and staticJavascript attributes default to true, but if dynamicJavascript is set to true and staticJavascript is set to false then only the dynamic JavaScript will be rendered. If dynamicJavascript is set to false and staticJavascript is set to true then only the static JavaScript will be rendered which can then be put in separate JSP page so the browser can cache the static JavaScript.

[Jan Groth]

no that's not correct. it works, at least on my machine :-)

errors.maxlength=Data can not be larger than {1} characters.

    
<field property="operations" depends="maxlength">
   <arg1 name="maxlength" key="${var:maxlength}" resource="false"/>
<var><var-name>maxlength</var-name><var-value>5000</var-value></var>
</field>

you need to use {1} as the argument, will not work with {0}

cheers,
jan

[Purushoth Thambu]

Jan, you overlooked the fact that 5000 is predefined constant. It's not the value user entered.

[Jan Groth]

Purushothaman, you are right :-)

[Brent Sterling]

This question comes up fairly often. I would say that the validation framework should be extended to support this behavior, but I do not see the value.

The basic idea is that you have a form with fields...say Name and Email Address. If validation fails then the page is redisplayed with the values that the user entered. The user would then see validation messages like "Name is required" or "Email Address is not a valid email address". Putting the email address that the user entered into the validation message does not seem to add much value because the user can look at the Email Address field and see the value that was invalid. Also if you had multiple email address fields on your page the user would have to figure out which field is invalid.

My $0.02.

- Brent