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Spring Webflow: Unit testing with Parent flows

Recently I had to test a webflow that extended a parent webflow. The documentation didn't offer much in the way of help but did suggest that you use getModelResources() method to register additional flows from the AbstractXmlFlowExecutionTests class @Override protected FlowDefinitionResource[] getModelResources(FlowDefinitionResourceFactory resourceFactory) { FlowDefinitionResource[] flowDefinitionResources = new FlowDefinitionResource[1]; flowDefinitionResources[0] = resourceFactory.createFileResource("src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/flows/base-flow.xml"); return flowDefinitionResources; } Great! Or so I thought... Below is how I extended the flow to use the base parent flow. I registered the base-flow.xml in the flowRegistry like below and I assumed that the AbstractXmlFlowExecutionTests class would register the flow as id="base" ... This was the wrong assumption, after debugging I no...
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IE8, Javascript Errors and console.log

Ran into an issue with IE8 and using the JQuery validation framework. Basically what was happening was that the validation framework was kicking in and identifying the errors (correct) but the form was still getting submitted to the server. (Incorrect!) Anyway after some investigation I found that it was the  console.log statements in the javascript code that was causing the issues. As I was using the developer toolbar provided with IE I wasn't seeing the issue this is because the console object gets created when you open the developer toolbar duh! So if you are getting some weird behaviour check that you don't have any console statements in you Javascript files.
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Spring-Webflow Exception The expression string to parse is required and must not be empty

Today I ran into a weird exception that was only happening on IE8, IE9. java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: The expression string to parse is required and must not be empty As this was not happening on Firefox or Chrome I began to wonder what IE was posting to the server.. After some investigation I found that IE was adding the submit button value to the POST url, see below HTML Submit Button: <input type="submit" value="Next" /> The Next value gets appended to the url: http://someurl.com/webflow/viewstate?param1=mark&param2=denieffe& =Next When Spring-Webflow tries to parse this it throws the exception above. My workaround was assign a name attribute to the html which produced a correct parameter mapping HTML Submit Button: <input type="submit" value="Next" name="nextBtn" /> The Next value gets appended to the url: http://someurl.com/webflow/viewstate?param1=mark&param2=denieffe& nextBtn=Next ...
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Adding code in blogger

As I'm new to Blogger I couldn't figure out how to highlight my code. So after trawling the web for 5 minutes I found a solution. 1. Create a new Post and switch to the HTML view. 2. Paste the following css and Javascript sources into  the file <script src="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.1.364/scripts/shCore.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.1.364/scripts/shBrushRuby.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.1.364/scripts/shLegacy.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <link href="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.1.364/styles/shCore.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"></link> <link href="http://alexgorbatchev.com/pub/sh/2.1.364/styles/shThemeDefault.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"...
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CSS - Styling Tags

Sometimes I forget how CSS sees the relationship from one tag to another and how to apply different CSS styling rules so I'm writing this post to help me remember. I'm using the book 'CSS - The missing manual' as a reference. Ancestor : A HTML tag that wraps around another tag is its ancestor Decendent : A tag inside one or more tags is a descendent. The <title> tag is inside the <head> and <html>  tags Parent : A parent tag is the closest ancestor of another tag. The <head> tag is the parent of <title> Child : A tag thats wrapped by another tag is a child tag. Sibling : Tags that are children of the same tag are called siblings Styling Groups of Tags To style groups of elements for example to have all header tags to have the same font and color you can create the following rule:  h1, h2, h3, h4 {color: #0EF333;} The Universal Selector (Asterisk *) An asterisk * is a universal selector for selecting every elem...
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Spring Webflow - Multiple evaluate statements in Action State

When executing mutiple expression statements in an action state you might encounter this exception org.springframework.webflow.engine.NoMatchingTransitionException: No transition was matched on the event(s) signaled by the [X] action(s) that executed in this action state This exception occurs because none of the evaluate statements trigger the transition. From the docs to trigger a transition a Action method has to return one of the following values A java.lang.String value A java.lang.Boolean value A java.lang.Enum value any other type success <action-state>    <evaluate expression="bean.setName('mark')"/>    <evaluate expression="bean.setAddress('Ireland')"/>    <transition to="myView"/> </action-state> So in our case our evaluate statements are not returning any of the event ids that will trigger a transition so we need to add the attribute element that will be set when the evaluate ...
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Accessing message properties in spring webflow

Spring Webflow Version: 3.0.5-RELEASE Problem: We needed to set different messages on the one screen depending on a type of object. Instead of using JSTL in the jsp file we decided to set the message in the flow xml file. To access and set a message in flowscope in webflow use the following snippet. <set name="flowScope.message" value="resourceBundle['some.view.message.header']" />
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