Problems with Struts 2 number validation

[Jack Dragano]

Hi all!
I'm developing a simple e-commerce web project for school, and today I had some troubles using validation framework built-in with Struts 2.
As discussed in this thread, it seems that Struts 2 simply ignore the fact that fields that should contain numbers, are empty. In other words, an empty string is considered to be a valid number.

I would like to solve this problem using XML only, is it possible? I know I could check fields within the Java code, but I think it's not the best solution.
I tried to use some validators (regex, required, requiredstring) before the <field-validator type="long">, but none of them worked. I suppose the reason's that all non-number validators expect a String from the getter, but they receives a long.

Any idea?

[Joe Ess]

Jack Dragano wrote: I know I could check fields within the Java code, but I think it's not the best solution.

Frankly, the "best solution" is the one that works. It looks like the XML validator doesn't do what you want it to do.
Since it looks like a few people have encountered this problem, you may want to check the Struts mailing list to see if anyone has an acceptable workaround. If you find one, be sure to check back in with us!

[Jack Dragano]

On an empty string Tomcat throws a silent exception, because it cannot find the method that takes a string.

I thought to change getter and setter to:

public void setQuantity(String q) {
    this.quantity = Long.parseLong(q);
}
//and 
public String getQuantity(){
    return Long.toString(this.quantity
}

and then evaluate it with both requiredstring and regex, to be sure that it's a number. Although not much elegant, it should work.