Spring web flow form binding append to list

Question

I'm learning to use Spring, Spring Webflow and Thymeleaf. I created a little old school wizard application where the user have to fill out some forms click the next button and at the end that was a configuration process. Every view-state's model is called Configuration which is my model class. This class contains a List<Note> notes. On every view-state the user has an option to add some notes. Now my issue is that with the form binding at every view-states this note list will be replaced instead of appended with the new note.

How can i append to this list instead of replace it at every view-state?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

In short: A standard java collections ArrayList is initialized with a FIXED size and cannot be appended to with NEW entries/pojos.

So if you want to bind/append new entries to a collection you need to use the

import org.springframework.util.AutoPopulatingList;

Instead of a standard

java.collections.List

See this answer I wrote on a similar question for more details:

spring webflow submit array with new items