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 ...