BindingResult always false Spring MVC

[santosh batta]

Hello,

       I'm trying to implement spring validation framework in my mvc application. My login page has user name and password which are mandatory. I defined them as not null and not empty in the model class. If they are left blank I expect spring to bind the errors to BindingResult object. I'm not sure where I'm doing it wrong.. the hasError() method of BindingResult always return false in my controller class.

Below is my login controller

@Controller
public class LoginController {

@Autowired
private UserRoleService userRoleService;

@Autowired
private AuthenticationService authenticationService;

@RequestMapping(value = "/login", method=RequestMethod.GET)
public ModelAndView showLoginPage() {
    System.out.println("coming into LoginController!!");
    ModelAndView mav = new ModelAndView("login");
    mav.addObject("userModel", new UserInfo());
    return mav;
}

@RequestMapping(value = "/welcome", method=RequestMethod.POST)
public ModelAndView login(@Valid @ModelAttribute("userModel") UserInfo user, BindingResult bindingResult) {
    System.out.println("authenticate username and password -- invoke LDAP!!");
    System.out.println(user.getUsername() + user.getPassword());
    String userId = user.getUsername();
    String password = user.getPassword();

    if(bindingResult.hasErrors())
    {
        return new ModelAndView("login");
    }

    if(authenticationService.athenticate(userId,password)) {            
        List<String> roles = userRoleService.searchRolesByUserId(userId);           
        for(String role : roles)
            System.out.println("role is: "+role);
        ModelAndView mav = new ModelAndView("welcome");
        return mav;
    }
    else {
        ModelAndView mav = new ModelAndView("login");
        mav.addObject("loginFailed", "User Name or Password is incorrect");
        return mav;
    }
}
}

Below is my model class...

public class UserInfo{

@NotNull
@NotEmpty(message="User name cannot be empty")
private String username;

@NotNull
@NotEmpty(message="Password cannot be empty")
private String password;

public String getUsername() {
    return username;
}

public void setUsername(String username) {
    this.username = username;
}

public String getPassword() {
    return password;
}

public void setPassword(String password) {
    this.password = password;
}

}

My spring xml has these necessary entries...

<bean id="viewResolver"     class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver" >     <property name="prefix">         <value>/views/</value>     </property>     <property name="suffix">         <value>.jsp</value>     </property> </bean> <mvc:resources mapping="/resources/**" location="/WEB-INF/resources/"/> <mvc:annotation-driven />

Below is my login jsp page...

<form:form class="form-signin" commandName="userModel" method="POST" action="login.do" id="loginform">

    <h2 class="form-signin-heading">Welcome to BPAY</h2>

    <div style="color: red">${loginFailed}</div>                                        

            <label for="inputEmail" class="sr-only">Username</label> 

            <form:input type="text" path="username" id="usernameId" class="form-control"
                placeholder="Username" required autofocus/>
            <form:errors path="username" cssClass="error"/>

            <label for="inputPassword" class="sr-only">Password</label> 

            <form:input type="password" id="passwordId" path="password" class="form-control"
                placeholder="Password" required/>
            <form:errors path="password" cssClass="error"/>

            <button class="btn btn-lg btn-primary btn-block" type="submit" value="OK">Login</button>                

    </form:form>

The bindingResult.hasErrors() method in my controller class always return false. Can you please let me know, what am I missing?

[Tim Nachreiner]

What does the console print when this line is executed in your controller: 

System.out.println(user.getUsername() + user.getPassword());

[Tim Nachreiner]

I took your code and built this app.  I can't believe you actually got it to the validation stage, because I had to fix some pieces prior to getting it to run.
First,

action="login.do"

needed to be changed to

action="welcome"

, because

"login.do"

doesn't exist in your controller.
Second, the

 form:input 

tag doesn't appear to support 'required' or 'autofocus', so I got rid of them.
I commented-out the call to authenticationService to simplify testing.
Once I made the above changes, the @Validation worked properly for hibernate validating username and password fields.

[Dave Tolls]

Tim Nachreiner wrote:
Second, the

 form:input 

tag doesn't appear to support 'required' or 'autofocus', so I got rid of them.

The form tags allow you to stick in any arbitrary attributes and reflects them in the output tag.
So "required" and "autofocus"should just get passed through to the final HTML tag.

[Tim Nachreiner]

When I run this code with "autofocus"....

<%@ page language="java" contentType="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" pageEncoding="ISO-8859-1"%>
<%@ taglib prefix="form" uri="http://www.springframework.org/tags/form" %>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
	<head>
		<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
		<title>Insert title here</title>
	</head>
<body>
	<form:form class="form-signin" commandName="userModel" method="POST" action="welcome" id="loginform">
	 
	    <h2 class="form-signin-heading">Welcome to BPAY</h2>
	 
	    <div style="color: red">${loginFailed}</div>                                        
	 
	            <label for="inputEmail" class="sr-only">Username</label> 
	 
	            <form:input type="text" path="username" id="usernameId" class="form-control"
	                placeholder="Username" autofocus />
	            <form:errors path="username" cssClass="error"/>
	 
	            <label for="inputPassword" class="sr-only">Password</label> 
	 
	            <form:input type="password" id="passwordId" path="password" class="form-control"
	                placeholder="Password" />
	            <form:errors path="password" cssClass="error"/>
	 
	            <button class="btn btn-lg btn-primary btn-block" type="submit" value="OK">Login</button>                
	    </form:form>
	</body>
</html>

I get this error

org.apache.jasper.JasperException: /WEB-INF/view/login.jsp (line: 19, column: 50) equal symbol expected
	org.apache.jasper.compiler.DefaultErrorHandler.jspError(DefaultErrorHandler.java:42)
	org.apache.jasper.compiler.ErrorDispatcher.dispatch(ErrorDispatcher.java:443)
	org.apache.jasper.compiler.ErrorDispatcher.jspError(ErrorDispatcher.java:89)

It sounds like you are saying I shouldn't be getting this error.  Can you clarify that point?
I don't get the error if I remove "autofocus".

[Dave Tolls]

Ah, I think it actually needs to be:

<form:input type="text" path="username" id="usernameId" class="form-control"
                    placeholder="Username" autofocus="autofocus" />

I think the same applies to the other "flag" attributes.

[Tim Nachreiner]

You are correct.
I added

autofocus="autofocus" required="required"

and it worked flawlessly.
Seems like a 'limited inheritance' feature.

[santosh batta]

Hi Tim,

Thank you for the corrections. I made the changes you suggest, and for spring forms, I modified the required and autofocus attributes as follows..

<form:form class="form-signin" commandName="userModel" method="POST" action="welcome" id="loginform">

<form:input type="text" path="username" id="usernameId" class="form-control"
					placeholder="Username" autofocus="autofocus"/>

The method still returns false when I leave username blank. However, when I implement spring's validator interface and bind the results it is working fine. I'm not sure what am I missing here.

[Tim Nachreiner]

I simplified your controller class to this:  It works fine for me.  Strip your code down to this level, test, build back up.

package dot.binder.controller;

import javax.validation.Valid;

import org.springframework.stereotype.Controller;
import org.springframework.validation.BindingResult;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.ModelAttribute;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMethod;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.ModelAndView;

import dot.binder.model.UserInfo;

@Controller
public class LoginController {
	
	@RequestMapping(value = "/", method = RequestMethod.GET)
	public String home() {
		return "redirect:/login"; 
	}

	@RequestMapping(value = "/login", method = RequestMethod.GET)
	public ModelAndView showLoginPage() {
		System.out.println("coming into LoginController!!");
		ModelAndView mav = new ModelAndView("login");
		mav.addObject("userModel", new UserInfo());
		return mav;
	}

	@RequestMapping(value = "/welcome", method = RequestMethod.POST)
	public ModelAndView login(@Valid @ModelAttribute("userModel") UserInfo user, BindingResult bindingResult) {
		System.out.println("authenticate username and password -- invoke LDAP!!");
		System.out.println(user.getUsername() + user.getPassword());
		if (bindingResult.hasErrors()) {
			return new ModelAndView("login");
		}		
		ModelAndView mav = new ModelAndView("welcome");
		return mav;
	}
}

[santosh batta]

Hi Tim,

I just copied your controller code, built and restarted the app. It is directly going to welcome page even if I leave username blank. There is certainly something else is going on. Not sure, what it is.. but for now, I have to go with implementing validator interface. Please let me know, if anything else strikes your mind. Thank you for all your time.

[Tim Nachreiner]

Let's verify you have the proper imports in your model class.  Do you have this:

import javax.validation.constraints.NotNull;

import org.hibernate.validator.constraints.NotEmpty;

public class UserInfo {

Also, let's modify your sysout to look like this:

System.out.println("debug: "+user.getUsername() + user.getPassword());

What does this sysout print when you don't enter username and password?

[santosh batta]

Yes, I do have those imports. one from javax and another from hibernate. I removed the sysout that prints username and password.

Just a side note, I wrote the custom validator class and now the validation is working fine. But I'm curious, why the annotated way is not working.

[Tim Nachreiner]

Can you post your new validation code?  I'd like to see it.

[santosh batta]

Hi Tim,

Here is my validator class..

@Component
public class UserInfoValidator implements Validator {

	@Override
	public boolean supports(Class<?> clazz) {
		 return UserInfo.class.isAssignableFrom(clazz);
	}

	@Override
	public void validate(Object target, Errors errors) {
				
		ValidationUtils.rejectIfEmptyOrWhitespace(errors, "username", "error.username", "UserName cannot be empty");
		ValidationUtils.rejectIfEmptyOrWhitespace(errors, "password", "error.password", "Password cannot be empty");
		
	}

}

Below is my new controller class..

@Controller
public class LoginController {
	
	private static final String LOGIN = "login";
	private static final String HOME = "welcome";
	
	private static final String thisClassName = LoginController.class.getName();
	private static final Logger log = LoggerFactory.getLogger(LoginController.class);
	
	@Autowired
	private UserRoleService userRoleService;
	
	@Autowired
	private AuthenticationService authenticationService;
		
	@Autowired
	private UserInfoValidator userInfoValidator;
	
	@RequestMapping(value = "/", method=RequestMethod.GET)
    public String redirectLoginPage() {
		
		return "redirect:" + LOGIN;
    }
 
	@RequestMapping(value = "/login", method=RequestMethod.GET)
    public ModelAndView showLoginPage() {
		
		log.info(" Show Login page ");
		
		ModelAndView mav = new ModelAndView(LOGIN);		
		mav.addObject("userModel", new UserInfo());
		return mav;
    }
	
	@RequestMapping(value = "/login", method=RequestMethod.POST)
    public ModelAndView login(@ModelAttribute("userModel") UserInfo user, BindingResult bindingResult) throws Exception {
		
		String method = thisClassName + ".login";	
		
		userInfoValidator.validate(user, bindingResult);
		
		if(bindingResult.hasErrors())
		{			
			return new ModelAndView(LOGIN);
		}
		
		String userId = user.getUsername().trim();
		String password = user.getPassword().trim();
		
		log.debug(method + " Authenticating user: "+ userId);				
		
		if(authenticationService.athenticate(userId,password)) {			
			List<String> roles = userRoleService.searchRolesByUserId(userId);
			log.debug(method + " User is authenticated. Displaying roles for "+userId);
			for(String role : roles)
				log.debug(role);
			ModelAndView mav = new ModelAndView("redirect:"+HOME);
			return mav;
		}
		else {
			log.debug(method + " User authentication failed for user "+userId);
			ModelAndView mav = new ModelAndView(LOGIN);
			mav.addObject("loginFailed", "User Name or Password is incorrect");
			return mav;
		}
    }
		
	@RequestMapping(value = "/welcome", method=RequestMethod.GET)
    public ModelAndView showWelcomePage() {
		
		log.info(" Show Welcome page ");
		
		ModelAndView mav = new ModelAndView(HOME);				
		return mav;
    }
}

Below is my modified jsp..

<form:form class="form-signin" commandName="userModel" method="POST" action="login" id="loginform">
	
		<h2 class="form-signin-heading">Welcome to BPAY</h2>
		
		<div style="color: red">${loginFailed}</div>										
				
				<form:input type="text" path="username" id="usernameId" class="form-control"
					placeholder="Username*" required="required" autofocus="autofocus"/>
				<form:errors path="username" cssClass="error"/>												
					
				<form:input type="password" id="passwordId" path="password" class="form-control"
					placeholder="Password*" required="required"/>
				<form:errors path="password" cssClass="error"/>
					
				<button class="btn btn-primary" type="submit" value="OK">Login</button>				
	
		</form:form>

[Tim Nachreiner]

Thanks.  If you ever go back and figure out your original problem, please post it to this thread.