Struts2: Checkboxlist defaulting selected values.

[Alex Fiorello]

Hi All,

I am a self taught Java developer, and am very new to Struts. I've been working on a project for a while now and have tried to refrain from asking "newbie" questions, however, there is something that has eluded me for some time, which seems to be very simply. I am trying to default selected items in a checkboxlist. I have searched this site and read the numerous similar topics where solutions have been offered. Either I am going mad, I'm making a newbie error or am missing something vital.

So I hope someone will be able to help.

To summarise. I have a checkboxlist that is displaying a list of available Locales/Languages (which is retrieved from a SQL Table). I am trying to have some of these ticked by default. This is what I have:

userManager.jsp

  	<s:if test="languageDescriptionMap.size() > 0"> 
 			<s:checkboxlist name="selectedLanguages" label="Select Languages" list="LanguageDescriptionMap" value="LanguagesSelected"/>  	
 	</s:if> 

This currently displays 4 checkbox's, none of which are ticked. And the HTML looks like this:

userManager - generated HTML

<div id="wwgrp_userFunctions_selectedLanguages" class="wwgrp">
<div id="wwlbl_userFunctions_selectedLanguages" class="wwlbl">
<label for="userFunctions_selectedLanguages" class="label">        Select Languages:</label>
</div> <br /><div id="wwctrl_userFunctions_selectedLanguages" class="wwctrl">
<input type="checkbox" name="selectedLanguages" value="en_GB" id="selectedLanguages-1"        />
<label for="selectedLanguages-1" class="checkboxLabel">English/Great Britain</label>
<input type="checkbox" name="selectedLanguages" value="en_NO" id="selectedLanguages-2"        />
<label for="selectedLanguages-2" class="checkboxLabel">English/Norwegian</label>
<input type="checkbox" name="selectedLanguages" value="en_FI" id="selectedLanguages-3"        />
<label for="selectedLanguages-3" class="checkboxLabel">English/Finland</label>
<input type="checkbox" name="selectedLanguages" value="en_DK" id="selectedLanguages-4"        />
<label for="selectedLanguages-4" class="checkboxLabel">English/Denmark</label>
<input type="hidden" id="__multiselect_userFunctions_selectedLanguages" name="__multiselect_selectedLanguages"
       value=""        /></div> </div>

While they are not visible above, the "values" of the checkbox items above do indeed cotnain an underscore, so en_FI, en_DK, en_NO for example.

The function getLanguagesSelected is as follows (currently hard coded, just to get this to work):

UserActions.java

	public String[] getLanguagesSelected() {
		return new String [] {"en_FI, en_NO"};
	}

Just to clarify, I have put a breakpoint in the above function and I know it is being called. So why doesn't it select the two checkboxes in my String Array?

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.

[Alex Fiorello]

Well, it was an embarrassing mistake!

The way I define my String Array on line 02 of UserActions.java is wrong! This would produce just one array item of "en_FI, en_NO" rather than 2 items.

If should have been:

return new String[]  {"en_FI", "en_NO"};

Which actually makes everything work as expected.