[panama-joe]

Hi,

I am getting the following error:

[ServletException in:/tiles/bodies/hierarchy/groupList.jsp] Cannot retrieve definition for form bean null’

The amazing thing is that that same code works flawlessly in native Eclipse (without MyEclipse).

Since we have not yet migrated our whole team to MyEclipse (I am still working on final evaluation), I have two parallel development environments on my machine: one being Eclipse 3.0.1 and MyEclipse 3.8.2 + QF20041020, the other one Eclipse 3.0.1 + Sysdeo Tomcat plugin 3.0. Both environments are plain installations from scratch barely three weeks old, and use Tomcat 5.0.28 as well as the Sourceforge Eclipse-ClearCase plugin 1.0.0M3.

I have updated the codebase from ClearCase several times,re-build (cleaned) and also re-deployed the project and restarted Tomcat, to make sure that both environments are exactly on the same level.

The jsp in question is a new file from a colleague.

I don’t quite understand how this issue is related to MyEclipse, but I don’t see any other possibility right now.

Any clues ?

Regards, Jochen

[Riyad Kalla]

Jochen,
You are correct that the problem isn’t related to MyEclipse. Just to give you some insight into how ME works, it really “sits ontop” of your project and provides nice editors and deployment/debugging to you… its not intrusive like JBuilder or other IDEs which “hook into” your app and would cause something that worked one place, to stop working another.

Now, knowing that, lets see if we can figure out whats going on. When you deploy your app, does it deploy with any problems? The “Cannot retrieve…” exception is almost always related to a bad mapping in your struts-config.xml file, e.g. the struts-config file has no “name” attribute in the action mapping, but in the JSP page you attempt to access one (bean:write for example). See if you can narrow down which bean this might be. Sometimes I wish the Struts errors were more helpful.

[Riyad Kalla]

Moving to J2EE dev

[panama-joe]

Riyad,

that hint with the missing name attribute in the struts-config was a bull’s eye shot !

THANKS A LOT !!

The only question remaining is: why doesn’t plain Eclipse / Tomcat (without MyEclipse) complain about this ?!?
Could this somehow be related to the Tomcat plugin used (Sysdeo vs. MyEclipse) … ?

Regards, Jochen

[Riyad Kalla]

Hey I’m glad it worked… I honestly don’t know why this would work without MyEclipse… are you sure you are deploying the same app to the same application server? Do you have multiple workspaces or project dirs setup that you think might be the same, but are slightly different?

[panama-joe]

I am 100% percent sure I am deploying the same app & the same code-level to the same Tomcat installation.

I have two different workspaces for both environments, which read the source code from two different ClearCase views, which use the same view profile, i.e. the ConfigSpec is identical.
Both of these workspaces were only created recently (~ three weeks ago), when I totally rebuilt both environments (Eclipse, MyEclipse, Workspaces, Views etc.).

Please don’t tell me to do it all over again, now that I just got our app working with MyEclipse … what about the Tomcat plugin ?

[Riyad Kalla]

Please don’t tell me to do it all over again, now that I just got our app working with MyEclipse

… I won’t, I’m not sure what the problem is here… the application had an error in it (struts-config.xml) and did not work when deployed from ME but did work when deployed using Sysdeo… there was obviously something different between these two setups, BUT besides that, it is now working so you can continue developing your application regardless of plugin strangeness… ultimately what matters is that the app runs under your application server… regardless of plugin configuration weirdness, if its broken its broken… MyEclipse and Sysdeo can only do so much to avoid that 😛

Are you still having a problem that you aren’t able to work around, or are you just curious why the discrepency between the two plugins? If its the first problem, then please clarify what the situation is… if its the second, then I really don’t know.

[panama-joe]

More out of curiosity, to be honest – I am stilll having some minor problems, as the struts-config still doesn’t seem to be perfect, but I hope I’ll be able to solve that one tomorrow with the guy who wrote this code … the most important thing is I am a little further, in that I get a decent error message now !

[Riyad Kalla]

If you find any more clues to the mystery as you are working I’m happy to help investigate if I have time.

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