Handling a form with Spring MVC without using the Spring <form:form> tag?

Question

Is it possible to handle a form using Spring annotation @ModelAttribute without using the Spring tag <form:form...>. I saw this way to do but it seems complex with using Thymeleaf (I don't know anything about it).

Spring is supposed to be a non-intrusive framework so is there an alternate solution to my problem?

Answer 1

If you build your form using Spring tags, it will be converted to HTML. Run your project and check the source code of your JSP site. Spring tags just make things a bit easier for a coder. For example

<form:form modelAttribute="newUser" action="/addUser" method="post">
   <form:input path="firstName" />
   <form:input path="lastName" />
   <button type="submit">Add</button>
</form:form>

will be converted to HTML

<form id="newUser" action="/addUser" method="post">
   <input id="firstName" name="firstName" type="text" value="" />
   <input id="lastName" name="lastName" type="text" value="" />
   <button type="submit">Add</button>
</form>

In Controller you add a data transfer object (DTO) to Model, for example

@RequestMapping(value = "/index", method = RequestMethod.GET)
public ModelAndView homePage() {
   ModelAndView model = new ModelAndView();
   model.addObject("newUser", new User());
   model.setViewName("index");
   return model;
}

and receive the form data

@RequestMapping(value = "/addUser", method = RequestMethod.POST)
public ModelAndView addUser(
        @ModelAttribute("newUser") User user) { ... }

Using Spring tags is totally optional as long as the naming of the form fields is exactly the same as in your bean object (here User class) and model.