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Tapestry provides support for creating and rendering forms, populating their fields, and validating user input. For simple cases, input validation is declarative, meaning you simply tell Tapestry what validations to apply to a given field, and it takes care of it on the server and (optionally) on the client as well. In addition, you can provide event handler methods in your page or component classes to handle more complex validation scenarios.

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Contents

The Form Component

The core of Tapestry's form support is the Form component. The Form component encloses (wraps around) all the other field components such as TextField, TextArea, Checkbox, etc.

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Next, all the fields inside the form are activated to pull values out of the incoming request, validate them and (if valid) store the changes.

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_For Tapestry 4 Users:_ Tapestry 5 does not use the fragile "form rewind" approach from Tapestry 4. Instead, a hidden field generated during the render stores the information needed to process the form submission.
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 After the fields have done their processing, the Form emits a "validate" event. This is your chance to perform any cross-form validation that can't be described declaratively.

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Finally, the Form emits a "submit" event, for logic that doesn't care about success or failure.

Note that the "prepare" event is emitted during both form rendering and form submission.

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Storing Data Between Requests

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Starting in Tapestry 5.4, the default behavior for server-side validation failures is to re-render the page within the same request (rather than emitting a redirect). This removes the need to use a session-persistent field to store the validation tracker when validation failures occur.
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As with other action requests, the result of a form submission (except when using Zones) is to send a redirect to the client, which results in a second request (to re-render the page). The ValidationTracker must be persisted (generally in the HttpSession) across these two requests in order to prevent the loss of validation information. Fortunately, the default ValidationTracker provided by the Form component is persistent, so you don't normally have to worry about it.

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package com.example.newapp.pages;


import com.example.newapp.services.UserAuthenticator;
import org.apache.tapestry5.annotations.*;
import org.apache.tapestry5.corelib.components.Form;
import org.apache.tapestry5.corelib.components.PasswordField;
import org.apache.tapestry5.ioc.annotations.Inject;


public class Login {
    @Persist
    @Property 
    private String userName;

    @Property
    private String password;

    @Inject
    private UserAuthenticator authenticator;

    @InjectComponent("password")
    private PasswordField passwordField;

    @Component
    private Form loginForm;

    /**
     * Do the cross-field validation
     */
    void onValidateFromLoginForm() {
        if (!authenticator.isValid(userName, password)) {
            // record an error, and thereby prevent Tapestry from emitting a "success" event
            loginForm.recordError(passwordField, "Invalid user name or password.");
        }
    }

    /**
     * Validation passed, so we'll go to the "PostLogin" page
     */
    Object onSuccess() {
        return PostLogin.class;
    }
}

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Note that the onValidateFromLoginForm() and onSuccess() methods are not public; event handler methods can have any visibility, even private. Package private (that is, no modifier) is the typical use, as it allows the component to be tested, from a test case class in the same package.
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Because a form submission is really two requests: the submission itself (which results in a redirect response), then a second request for the page (which results in a re-rendering of the page), it is necessary to persist the userName field between the two requests, by using the @Persist annotation. This would be necessary for the password field as well, except that the PasswordField component never renders a value.

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Rendering the page gives a reasonably pleasing first pass:

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The Tapestry Form component is responsible for creating the necessary URL for the form submission (this is Tapestry's responsibility, not yours).

For the TextField, we provide a component id, userName. We could specify the value parameter, but the default is to match the TextField's id against a property of the container, the Login page, if such a property exists. 

As a rule of thumb, you should always give your fields a specific id (this id will be used to generate the name and id attributes of the rendered tag). Being allowed to omit the value parameter helps to keep the template from getting too cluttered.

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<div class="form-group">
  <label for="userName" class="control-label">User Name</label>
  <input id="userName" class="form-control" name="userName" type="text">
</div>

Form Validation

The above example is a very basic form which allows the fields to be empty. However, with a little more effort we can add client-side validation to prevent the user from submitting the form with either field empty.

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<t:textfield t:id="userName" validate="required" t:mixins="formgroup"/>
<t:passwordfield t:id="password" value="password" validate="required" t:mixins="formgroup"/>

Available Validators

Tapestry provides the following built-in validators:

Centralizing Validation with @Validate

The @Validate annotation can take the place of the validate parameter of TextField, PasswordField, TextArea and other components. When the validate parameter is not bound in the template file, the component will check for the @Validate annotation and use its value as the validation definition.

The annotation may be placed on the getter or setter method, or on the field itself.

Let's update the two fields of the Login page:

  @Persist
  @Property
  @Validate("required")
  private String userName;

  @Property
  @Validate("required")
 private String password;

Now, we'll rebuild the app, refresh the browser, and just hit enter:

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Centralizing Validation with @Validate

The @Validate annotation can take the place of the validate parameter of TextField, PasswordField, TextArea and other components. When the validate parameter is not bound in the template file, the component will check for the @Validate annotation and use its value as the validation definition.

The annotation may be placed on the getter or setter method, or on the field itself.

Let's update the two fields of the Login page:

  @Persist
  @Property
  @Validate("required")
  private String userName;

  @Property
  @Validate("required")
 private String password;

Now, we'll rebuild the app, refresh the browser, and just hit enter:

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The form has updated, in place, to present the errors. You will not be able to submit the form until some value is provided for each field.

HTML5 Client-side Validation

When the tapestry.enable-html5-support configuration symbol is set to true (it is false by default), the Tapestry's built-in validators will automatically enable the HTML5-specific "type" and validation attributes to the rendered HTML of Tapestry's form components, triggering the HTML5 client-side validation behavior built into most modern browsers. For example, if you use the "email" and "required" validators, like this:

<t:textfield validate="email,required" .../>

then the output HTML will look like this:

<input type="email" required ...>

which causes modern browsers to present a validation error message whenever text is entered that doesn't look like an email address, or if the field is left blank.

The browser's built-in validation is performed before Tapestry's own client-side validation. This is so that older browsers will still perform client-side validation as expected.

The following behaviors are included:

• The "required" validator adds the "required" attribute to the rendered HTML

• The "checked" validator adds the "required" attribute to the rendered HTML  (Since 5.4.5)

• The "regexp" validator adds the "pattern" attribute to the rendered HTML
• The "email" validator sets the type attribute to "email" in the rendered HTML
• The "min" validator sets the type attribute to "number" and adds the "min" attribute in the rendered HTML
• The "max" validator sets the type attribute to "number" and adds the "max" attribute in the rendered HTML
• When bound to a number type, the TextField component sets the type attribute to "number" in the rendered HTML

Server Side Validation

Some validation can't, or shouldn't, be done on the client side. How do we know if the password is correct? Short of downloading all users and passwords to the client, we really need to do the validation on the server.

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Entering any two values into the form and submitting will cause a round trip; the form will re-render to present the error to the user:

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Notice that the cursor is placed directly into the password field.

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Customizing Validation Messages

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The message can be customized by adding an entry to the page's message catalog (or the containing component's message catalog). As with any localized property, this can also go into the application's message catalog.localized property, this can also go into the application's message catalog.

The first key checked is formId-fieldId-validatorName-message.

• formId: the local component id of the Form component
• fieldId: the local component id of the field (TextField, etc.)
• validatorName: the name of the validator, i.e., "required" or "minlength"

If there is no message for that key, a second check is made, for The first key checked is formId-fieldId-validatorName-message.

• formId: the local component id of the Form component
• fieldId: the local component id of the field (TextField, etc.)
• validatorName: the name of the validator, i.e., "required" or "minlength"

If there is no message for that key, a second check is made, for fieldId-validatorName-message. If that does not match a message, then the built-in default validation message is used.

 If that does not match a message, then the built-in default validation message is used.

For example, if the form ID is "loginForm", the field ID is "userName", and the validator is "required" then Tapestry will first look for a "loginForm-userName-required-message" key in the message catalog, and then for a "userName-required-message" key.

The validation message in the message catalog may contain printf-style format strings (such as %s) to indicate where the validate parameter's value will be inserted. For example, if the validate parameter in the template is minLength=3 and the validation message is "User name must be at least %s characters" then the corresponding error message would be "User name must be at least 5 characters"For example, if the form ID is "loginForm", the field ID is "userName", and the validator is "required" then Tapestry will first look for a "loginForm-userName-required-message" key in the message catalog, and then for a "userName-required-message" key.

Customizing Validation Messages for BeanEditForm

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Validation Macros

Lists of validators can be combined into validation macros. This mechanism is convenient for ensuring consistent validation rules across an application. To create a validation macro, just contribute to the ValidatorMacro Service in your module class (normally AppModule.java), by adding a new entry to the configuration object, as shown below. The first parameter is the name of your macro, the second is a comma-separated list of validators:

@Contribute(ValidatorMacro.class)
public static void combinePasswordValidators(MappedConfiguration<String, String> configuration) {
      configuration.add("passwordpasswordValidator","required,minlength=5,maxlength=15,");
}

Then, you can use this new macro in component templates and classes:

<input t:type="textField" t:id="password" t:validate="passwordpasswordValidator" />

@Validate("password")
private String password;

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