Force struts2 form to return LinkedHashMap?

[Raymond Holguin]

Ok my situation is that I have a series of checkboxes and I create them using a LinkedHashMap so that the order I put the data in the Map is the same order they appear as checkboxes in the UI. That part works perfectly, the problem is that when i submit the form the data seems to get thrown into a HashMap and the results are returned in a sorted order....not the same order as they appear. Its crucial that I get the ordering. any ideas on how I can do this???

Currently I have my form object:

public class ScheduleExportForm {
	Map<String,String> exportFields = new LinkedHashMap<String,String>();

	public Map<String, String> getExportFields() {
		return exportFields;
	}
	public void setExportFields(Map<String, String> exportFields) {
		this.exportFields = exportFields;
	}
}

I set the checkboxes in my prepare() method:

public void prepare() throws C3Exception {
		Map<String,String> fields = form.getExportFields();
		if(fields.size() == 0) {
			fields = new LinkedHashMap<String,String>();
			
			fields.put("xx", "Session");
			fields.put("ss", "Session Length");
			fields.put("zz", "StartDate");
			fields.put("aa", "Course Prefix");
			
			form.setExportFields(fields);
		}
	}

They display perfectly in my UI layed out the way i inserted them:

<s:iterator value="%{form.exportFields}" var="field">
				<tr>
					<td><s:checkbox name="exportFields['%{#field.key}']" fieldValue="%{exportFields.get(#field.key)}" /></td>
					<td>${value}</td>
				</tr>
			</s:iterator>

but when i check all the boxes the keyset become sorted. I know a way I could do it would be something like and do some string parsing to display the data correctly....this but I dont want to do it this way

fields.put("1", "Session_xx");
			fields.put("2", "Session Length_ss");
			fields.put("3", "StartDate_zz");
			fields.put("4", "Course Prefix_aa");

[Joe Ess]

You will probably have to make a custom type converter to override the default behavior.

[Raymond Holguin]

hmmm...yea i couldn't figured out how to get that to do what i wanted. so i just went with plan B which was use numeric keys, then once struts returned the unsorted hashmap i just sorted the keys and i got what i wanted.