Java EE (Java Enterprise Edition) General Discussion

I have searched all over the web and seem to be getting tantalizingly close, but...

I have an ActionForm object ("parentForm") that contains an array of ActionForm objects ("childForm"). In my jsp page, I want to be able to set the value of multiple childForms (using text areas).

Both ActionForm classes are listed in the struts-config.xml file.

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The relevant portion of my ParentForm class looks like this:

// variable
private ChildForm[] children = new ChildForm[10];

// constructor
public ParentForm()
{
super();
// initialize children
for(int i = 0; i < children.length; ++i)
{
children[i] = new ChildForm();
}
}

// getter and setter methods
public ChildForm[] getChildren(){
return children;
}

public void setChilren(ChildForm[] children){
this.children = children;
}

public ChildForm getChildren(int index){
return children[index];
}

public void setChildren(int index, ChildForm child)
{
children[index] = child;
}

The ChildForm object is very simple:

private String name = null;

public String getName(){
return name;
}

public void setName(String name){
this.name = name;
}

My jsp page looks like this:

<html:form method="post" action="action.do">
<logic:iterate name="parentForm" property="children" id="child">
<html:textarea indexed="true" name="child" property="name" cols="40" rows="3"/>
</logic:iterate>
<html:submit/>
</html:form>

The generated HTML seems correct:

<textarea name="child[0].name" cols="40" rows="3"></textarea>
...
<textarea name="child[9].name" cols="40" rows="3"></textarea>

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When the input page comes up, all of the text boxes are created. However, after I enter information into them and submit and the page is redisplayed (b/c of a validation failure), the text areas do not contain any values. In my validate() method after hitting submit, I probe for any children values, but they are all null. There seems to be a disconnect b/w the values I enter in the jsp and what gets updated in the Actionform.

There seems to be a lot of different ways to do this thing on the web, although none of them seemed to work for me. This appeared to be the cleanest method. Any ideas?