Passing form input values as a List of objects from a JSP page to a Servlet

Question

Here is a simplified (NOT real world) example. Suppose there is a domain model - a class Movie, which has a List of actors. A class Actor has three fields (name, birthDate, rolesNumber). The following code is an illustration of this scenario:

Movie.java

public class Movie {

    // some fields

    private List<Actor> actors;

    // getters and setters
}

Actor.java

public class Actor {

    private String name;

    private Date birthDate;

    private int rolesNumber;

    // getters and setters
} 

There is also a JSP page where we output in a loop the information about every actor that plays in a concrete movie and the user can update the corresponding text field values and submit changes to a servlet:

actorsUpdate.jsp

...
<c:forEach items="${movie.actors}" var="actor">
    <table>
        <tr>
            <th>Name</th>
            <td><input type="text" value="${actor.name}" /></td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <th>Birth Date</th>
            <td><input type="text" value="${actor.birthDate}" /></td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <th>Number of Previous Roles</th>
            <td><input type="text" value="${actor.rolesNumber}" /></td>
        </tr>
    </table>
    <hr />
</c:forEach>
...

It is known that in order to retrieve text fields in a servlet, one can use ServletRequest's methods like getParameter() or getParameterValues() etc. But how to retrieve the updated input fields as a List of objects (so that every three related values were grouped)?

If it were Spring project we could use Spring's <form:form modelAttribute="modelName">
tag and have a backing object defined in the modelAttribute. But how about pure JSP/Servlet project?

Possible solution

One of the possible solutions is to assign names in the "name" attribute of the text inputs and append varStatus.index, like this:

<c:forEach items="${movie.actors}" var="actor" varStatus="counter">
    <table>
        <tr>
            <th>Name</th>
            <td><input type="text" name="name${counter.index}" value="${actor.name}" /></td>
        </tr>
        ...
    </table>
    <hr />
</c:forEach>

So this index would allow us to identify values related to ONE object. And we could also generate some hidden input field where we could store a loop count (a number of actors), and then in a servlet we could retrieve the values related to one object like this:

List<Actor> actors= new ArrayList<Actor>();
DateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd");
for (int i = 0; i < count; i++) {
    String name= request.getParamater("name" + i);
    Date birthDate = dateFormat.parse(request.getParamater("birthDate" + i));
    int rolesNumber = Integer.parseInt(request.getParamater("rolesNumber" + i));

    Actor actor = new Actor(name, birthDate, rolesNumber);
    actors.add(actor);
}

---

My questions are:

1. Is there another, more elegant and effective way of passing the updated text field values to a servlet as a List of objects?

2. Is there any solution similar or equivalent to that of the Spring's <form:form> tag in a world of pure JSP/JSTL/EL/Servlets?

---

UPDATE

Looks like nobody knows the answer to the above questions. The accepted answer is not exactly what I asked for (see my comments to it).

There seems to be no equivalent of Spring's <form:form modelAttribute> tag or something similar in the world of pure Servlets/JSP.

Well, full Java EE, or Spring Framework, Apache Struts or another powerful web application framework to the rescue!

Solution

you can use the same name(revisionNumber) for all the inputs and use

String[] revisionNumber = request.getParamaterValues("revisionNumber") to get an array.

Comments

[informatik01]

But how to be sure that, for example, the concrete "revisionNumber" is related to concrete "revisionDate" and concreate "comment". In my example, three above mentioned fields relate to ONE Detail object. I know about picking values as an array, just wanted to know if there is some way to MAKE SURE that each of those three fields get retrieved as a group.

[informatik01]

Or they will be definitely collected in the order? Any ideas?