One of the things that I really liked about the WebWork/Struts projects was the way the default them would create the field text for you and change the label to red on a field error. The downfall to using the default them was that I had to make my pages in the WebWorks/Struts table and field layout, so I chose to use the simple theme.

Since I chose to use the simple theme, I had to come up with a new way of making the label of a field change to red for a field error. To do this I decided to create a taglib that I could use in my jsp pages to accomplish this. I figured that I could have the taglib accept a field name and cssClass as string arguments. If the field errors map contains a matching field key, then I would append "Err" to the cssClass variable passed into the tag and the css class name is written to the page output. If a error is not found for the field, then the cssClass value is just written out to the page.

Here is the code I used to do the check:

  public static String cssErrorCheck(String field, String cssClass)
  {
    ActionInvocation av = ActionContext.getContext().getActionInvocation();
    ActionSupport as = null;
    if (av != null){
      as = (ActionSupport)av.getAction();
    }
    
    if ((as != null) && (as.hasFieldErrors()))
    {
      if (as.getFieldErrors().containsKey(field))
      {
        return cssClass + "Err";
      }
    }
    return cssClass;
  }

Here is the css styles that I have setup in a stylesheet that is imported on every page:

.label {font-style:normal;}
.labelErr {font-style:italic; color:red; }

So now on my jsp page all I have to do is call the tag in my jsp page and if the field matches a error in the stack, then the field label is changed to red and the text is now in italic.

    <td align=right class="<wwerr:cssErr cssClass="label" fieldName="pe.firstName" />">
      <span class="required">* </span>First Name:
    </td>

If you would like to download the source code for my taglib, then click here.