Spring: Developing Java Applications for the Enterprise

Serving and processing forms

In the previous chapters, you learned how to retrieve data from an in-memory database using the Controller, but you didn't learn how to store the data in an in-memory database from the View. In Spring MVC, the process of putting an HTML form element's values into model data is called form binding.

In all the previous chapter's examples, you saw that the data transfer took place from the Model to the View via the Controller. The following line is a typical example of how we put data into the Model from the Controller:

model.addAttribute(greeting,"Welcome") 

Similarly, the next line shows how we retrieve that data in the View using a JSTL expression:

<p> ${greeting} </p> 

But what if we want to put data into the Model from ...