title: Spring Framework 3.0.5 - spring form data binding - comma delimiter
body: <p>I have a group editation form:</p>
  
  <pre><code>            &lt;form:form method="POST" action="" commandName="group"&gt;
              &lt;table&gt;         
                  &lt;tr&gt;
                      &lt;td&gt;&lt;form:label path="name"&gt;Name&lt;/form:label&gt;&lt;/td&gt;
                      &lt;td&gt;&lt;form:input path="name" disabled="disabled" /&gt;&lt;/td&gt;
                      &lt;td&gt;&lt;form:errors path="name" class="error" /&gt;&lt;/td&gt;
                  &lt;/tr&gt;
                  &lt;tr&gt;
                      &lt;td&gt;&lt;form:label path="description"&gt;Description&lt;/form:label&gt;&lt;/td&gt;
                      &lt;td&gt;&lt;form:input path="description" /&gt;&lt;/td&gt;
                      &lt;td&gt;&lt;form:errors path="description" class="error" /&gt;&lt;/td&gt;
                  &lt;/tr&gt;
                  &lt;tr&gt;
                      &lt;td&gt;&lt;form:label path="gidNumber"&gt;GID&lt;/form:label&gt;&lt;/td&gt;
                      &lt;td&gt;&lt;form:input path="gidNumber" /&gt;&lt;/td&gt;
                      &lt;td&gt;&lt;form:errors path="gidNumber" class="error" /&gt;&lt;/td&gt;
                  &lt;/tr&gt;
                  &lt;tr&gt;
                      &lt;td colspan="3"&gt;&lt;input type="submit" /&gt;&lt;/td&gt;
                  &lt;/tr&gt;       
              &lt;/table&gt;
              &lt;form:hidden path="members" /&gt;
          &lt;/form:form&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This form is binding object of class Group. Problem is with binding the member attribute to the hidden field. The deffinition of the memeber attribute in Group class is below. The group class is also being used by Spring LDAP ODM manager, (thus the annotations there).</p>
  
  <pre><code>@Attribute(name="member", syntax="1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.115.121.1.12")
  private List&lt;String&gt; members = new ArrayList&lt;String&gt;();
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The content of this array list is usually something like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>1: uid=user1,ou=users,dc=example,dc=com
  2: uid=lilcuttie2,ou=users,dc=example,dc=com
  3: uid=naprostejmagor,ou=users,dc=example,dc=com
  4: uid=crazyuser,ou=users,dc=brazzers,dc=com
  ...
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>When the content is binded to hidden field it is concatenated to the comma delimited and then when it is beeing splited again to the arraylist entries, of course each entry is broken to four separate entries.</p>
  
  <p>I've tried to use custom converter for ArrayList, but it messed up some otheer stuf like loading resource messages for locales..</p>
  
  <p>Do you have any suggestions how to deal with it in any non-ugly way - so that I dont have to wrap my DAO classes nor modify them.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks,</p>
  
  <p>/Jakub</p>