At the company where I work, we are upgrading our WebSphere servers from version 5 to 6. In the process, we are also updating our Java applications. Part of the application upgrades involve converting from Struts 1.1 to 1.2.8.
I have spent two days puzzled by the problem this caused with form bean validation. I was getting errors like this:
org.apache.commons.validator.ValidatorException: org.apache.struts.validator.FieldChecks.validateMask(java.lang.Object, org.apache.commons.validator.ValidatorAction, org.apache.commons.validator.Field, org.apache.struts.action.ActionErrors, javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest)
at org.apache.commons.validator.ValidatorAction.loadValidationMethod(ValidatorAction.java:627)
at org.apache.commons.validator.ValidatorAction.executeValidationMethod(ValidatorAction.java:557)
at org.apache.commons.validator.Field.validateForRule(Field.java:827)
at org.apache.commons.validator.Field.validate(Field.java:906)
The error message gives no indication of what the actual problem is, and while I found several posts on the Internet of people who have had the problem, I have not seen any solutions yet. My best clue was from an article in the Apache Wiki.
The root cause is that the validation method's signature has changed. Another issue is that the old ActionError method has been depricated and replaced with ActionMessages. Rules in your validation-rules.xml file should now look like this:
classname="org.apache.struts.validator.FieldChecks"
method="validateRequired"
methodParams="java.lang.Object,
org.apache.commons.validator.ValidatorAction,
org.apache.commons.validator.Field,
org.apache.struts.action.ActionMessages,
org.apache.commons.validator.Validator,
javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest"
msg="errors.required"/>
Hope that helps someone
