Form tag

Common task in web development is populating form with existing values. This is one of those repetitive tasks: each text field has to be HTML-encoded, then there are checkboxes and radios, select boxes with options and so on. Jodd offers one very simple way how to populate forms.

Usage

It is trivial: just wrap form with Form tag. That is all. Example:

    <j:form>
    <form id="form" method="post" action="....">
        <input type="text" name="foo.text">
    </form>
    </j:form>

Form tag simply parses forms HTML and searches for form fields. For each form field it reads name attribute and resolves the value assigned to the same name from various scopes, starting from page to the application scope. In above example, Form tag will try to resolve foo.text value from scopes.

When value is found, it will be used to populate form field. In case of text fields, value will be HTML-encoded; for checkboxes and radios field will be checked, and so on.

Above example would render to:

    <form id="form" method="post" action="....">
        <input type="text" name="foo.text" value="some foo.text value">
    </form>

Once again, Form tag supports ALL types of form fields.