Not filling all Spring form fields and getting bad request error 400

Question

I have this hibernate model:

@Entity
@Table(name="BlogPost")
public class BlogPost implements Serializable {

  @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.AUTO)
    private int id;

    @Column
    private String title;

    @Column
    private String text;

    @Column(name="creation_date")
    private Date creationDate;

    @ManyToOne
    @JoinColumn(name = "cat_id")
    private PostCategory category;
}

and this form:

       <form:form action="saveBlogPost" method="post" modelAttribute="blogPost">
    <table>
        <form:hidden path="id"/>
        <tr>
            <td>Title:</td>
            <td><form:input path="title" /></td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td>Text:</td>
            <td><form:input path="text"  /></td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td>Category:</td>
            <td>
              <form:select path="category">
                 <c:forEach items="${allCats}" var="cat" >
                     <form:option value="${cat.id}">
                        ${cat.title}
                     </form:option>
                 </c:forEach>
              </form:select>
           </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td colspan="2" align="center"><input type="submit" value="Save"></td>
        </tr>
    </table>
    </form:form>

and this controller method:

@RequestMapping(value = "/saveBlogPost", method = RequestMethod.POST)
public ModelAndView saveEmployee(@ModelAttribute BlogPost blogPost) {
    if (blogPost.getId() == 0) { 
        blogPost.setCategory(postCategoryServiceImpl.getPostCategory(blogPost.getCategory().getId()));

        blogPost.setCreationDate(new Date());
        blogPostServiceImpl.addBlogPost(blogPost);
    } else {
        blogPostServiceImpl.updateBlogPost(blogPost);
    }
    return new ModelAndView("redirect:/");
}

I set my creationDate in the controller and other fields done by Spring form. I suspect not setting creationDate in the form caused getting bad request error on form submit.

What should I do to avoid this error?

Answer 1

Looks like same issue as Spring MVC Error: Failed to convert property value of type java.lang.String to required type .

That is, <form:select> only submits a single string value, which you're telling Spring to put into a PostCategory object.

Try telling it to put the value into the category sub-object's id field:

<form:select path="category.id">