html:hidden

[Gayatri Sinha]

Hi,

Is it possible to have a

<html:hidden name="text" value="<bean:write name='messageText' property='messageText'/>" />

Also, do I have the single and double quotes right? Does the strust tag take single quotes ?

Thanks

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Mangesh,
No. You can't have a tag within a tag. It doesn't have to do with the quotes though. The tags only get evaluated in one pass. So the second set of tags never gets expanded.

[Brent Sterling]

As pointed out, the nested tag syntax will not work, but you can probably do what you are trying to accomplish with the hidden tag. I am not sure if you are getting the value from your Action Form or what your bean and property names are. Maybe one of the following will work:

<html:hidden property='messageText' />
<html:hidden name='messageText' property='messageText' />
<html:hidden name='text' property='messageText.messageText' />

Look at the documentation for the hidden tag (http://struts.apache.org/struts-taglib/tagreference-struts-html.html#html:hidden) and see what combination of name, property and value are right for your case. You can also use a scriptlet to set the value.

- Brent

[Merrill Higginson]

If you're not setting the value of a hidden field from an ActionForm property, you may as well just use the <input> tag instead of the <html:hidden> tag.

The following should work:

<input type="hidden" value="<bean:write name='messageText' property='messageText'/>" >

Since Struts uses the name property of an <input> tag to match to the same property on the ActionForm, it will get set properly when the form is submitted.

[Gayatri Sinha]

Thanks for the replies,

I had one more question
<html:hidden property="text" value="myname" />
Is this same as
<input type="hidden" name="text" value="myname">

The "text" is no bean, its a new value that I am creatign in a form to be passed to the servlet. for html:hidden I know that the "property" is compulsory, so in the above case is the property same as the name in html hidden tag?

Thanks once again

[Merrill Higginson]

Yes, the property attribute of an <html:hidden> tag is equivalent to the name attribute of an <input> tag. If you use the view source function of your browser to see the rendered HTML of your pages, you'll see that your <html:xxx property="YYY"> tags have been translated to <input name="YYY"> tags.