<form:form method="post" action="addLesson" modelAttribute="lesson"> <form:select path="course"> <form:options items="${courses}"/> </form:select> <input type="submit" name="addLesson" value="Add lesson"> </form:form>
By default, once this form is submitted - it only posts selected item as a string not full-fledged Course object.
In this sample demo, a full-fledged object can be converted by using Formatter<T>
To make it work, we need to implement Formatters to convert our course and data centers back and forth to IDs. Regarding Formatters, I’ll let you read about them in the Spring Reference Documentation: 7.6 Spring Field Formatting
This repository is created from my answer in StackOverflow -
Spring-MVC: Get full-fledged object instead of string when using 'select-options'