Struts 1 and enums - heads up

I lost some good hours on the weekend trying to find out, why a field in my struts form bean was not filled with the correct value, while I could see in the HttpRequest, that the browser / page was indeed sending the correct data.

My form bean contained something like:

public class MyBean extends ValidatorForm {
 
   private MyEnum anEnum;
   private String someField;
 
   public MyEnum getAnEmum() {...}
   public void setAnEnum(MyEnum val) {...}
 
   public String getSomeField() {...}
   public void setSomeField(String val) {...}
}

Not only did my class compile well, I also did not get any errors when running the code - except that anEnum was always populated with the first value listed in MyEnum.

After I changed anEnum to String (and the getter/setter too) and did the conversion to Enum in the backend code, all was fine.

And yes, after I found the solution, I remembered, that we did have such an issue in the past already :-/