I'm using Thymeleaf and Spring. I have a page on which I want to populate some fields and I'm passing in a Map object to the page model using model.addAttribute as below. pbObject is a PassbackObject that we're using to pass data between form pages.
Map<String, Object> formData = new HashMap<>();
formData.put("station", station);
pbModel.setFromPriorForm(formData);
model.addAttribute("pbObject", pbModel);
System.out.println("The station object is: " + formData.get('station'));
System.out.println("The class of the Station object is: " + formData.get("station").getClass());
The two print statements return the station object and org.unavco.web.response.obj.Station as expected so the object types are fine here.
The problem arises when I try to access the Map object in Thymeleaf.
<input th:value="${pbObject.fromPriorForm.get('station').getClass()}"/>
The above code populates the input field with class java.lang.String. It's not a String!!! It's a Station! And yes, it's seeing the correct data because if I remove .getClass() I see the correct data (apparently as a String). I need to be able to access the object attributes later on so a String won't cut it. Why is Thymeleaf casting my mapped object to a String? How can I make it preserve the original object class?
