Jakarta Struts Cookbook

9.6. Formatting Error Messages

Problem

Your application requires a custom look and feel for error messages beyond the abilities of the html:errors tag.

Solution

Use the logic:messagesPresent and the html:messages tags to display the error messages in a custom format. The JSP fragment (errors.inc.jsp) shown in Example 9-11 can be included on any page that may need to display errors.

Example 9-11. Custom error display

<logic:messagesPresent>
<table border="1" bgcolor="orange" width="100%" align="center">
    <tr><td>
        <p>
            <img src="/images/icon-warning.gif" border="0"
              vspace="2" hspace="10" align="center">
            WARNING: <bean:message key="errors.heading"/>
        </p>    
        <ul>
            <html:messages id="error">
                <li><bean:write name="error"/></li>
            </html:messages>
        </ul>
    </td></tr>
</table>
<p>
</logic:messagesPresent>

Tip

The images used in the examples are included with the online source.

Discussion

Errors displayed using the JSP code in Example 9-11 result in a display similar to Figure 9-5.

Figure 9-5. Custom formatted errors

Though the html:errors tag is a convenient way of displaying error messages, it's fairly restrictive in its formatting. By default, it displays all errors for a page, starting with a header markup, then each error message, and ending with footer markup.

Tip

Using the property attribute, you can tell the html:errors tag to display error messages for a specific field. This ability is commonly used to display ...