Thank you everyone for your replies.
Here are my concerns:
Jeanne mentioned that I could put the data in hidden fields too - Actually I simplified my problem and mentioned only one history section.. infact I have many different such history sections in one
jsp itself and I have many jsps with the same problem.. so this is lots of extra work.
Merrill's suggestion is one of the options I have been considering.. not very sure yet what route I'll take.. I just was curious to know if others do it differently
Chris, I'm not clear about your solution.. do I really need to associate a 'history' with a user because my history doesn't have to do anything with the user.. but history about the entity the user is trying to update. Please let me know if I misunderstood.
Another option (not sure how good it is) I'm considering is putting client-side validation (javascript) on the front so that basic server-side validation never needs to happen.. but this will still not work if in future I need to do server side business logic validation and throw the error back.
Any other ideas ?
Tks!