title: Spring MVC + FreeMarker: How to render option tag?
body: <p>The Spring 3 MVC docs state that option tags can be rendered like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;tr&gt;
        &lt;td&gt;Country:&lt;/td&gt;
        &lt;td&gt;
            &lt;form:select path="country"&gt;
                &lt;form:options items="${countryList}" itemValue="code" itemLabel="name"/&gt;
            &lt;/form:select&gt;
        &lt;/td&gt;
  &lt;/tr&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I am using FreeMarker with Spring MVC, so I interpret this as:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;tr&gt;
      &lt;td&gt;Place:&lt;/td&gt;
      &lt;td&gt;
          &lt;@form.select path="place"&gt;
              &lt;@form.options items="${places}" itemValue="id" itemLabel="name"/&gt;
  
          &lt;/@form.select&gt;
      &lt;/td&gt;
  &lt;/tr&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>When I hit the page I get the following exception:</p>
  
  <pre><code>freemarker.core.NonStringException: Error on line 40, column 73 in event.ftl
  Expecting a string, date or number here, Expression places is instead a freemarker.template.SimpleSequence
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>What should I use instead of ${places} in my FreeMarker template so that the above works?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks.</p>