Answer - ActionForms are added to a servlet scope (session or request) as beans. What this means is that, for certain functionality to be available, your ActionForms will have to follow a few simple rules. First, your ActionForm bean must have a zero-arguments constructor. This is required because Struts must be able to dynamically create new instances of your form bean class, while knowing only the class name. This is not an onerous restriction, however, because Struts will also populate your form bean's properties (from the request parameters) for you. Second, the fields of your form bean are made available to the framework by supplying public getter and setter methods that follow the naming design patterns described in the JavaBeans Specification. For most users, that means using the following idiom for each of your form bean's properties: private {type} fieldName; public {type} getFieldName() { return (this.fieldName); } public void setFieldName({type} fieldName) { this.fieldName = fieldName; } NOTE - you MUST obey the capitalization conventions shown above for your ActionForm properties to be recognized. The property name in this example is "fieldName", and that must also be the name of the input field that corresponds to this property. A bean property may have a "getter" method and a "setter" method (in a form bean, it is typical to have both) whose name starts with "get" or "set", followed by the property name with the first character capitalized. (For boolean properties, it is also legal to use "is" instead of "get" as the prefix for the getter method.) Advanced JavaBeans users will know that you can tell the system you want to use different names for the getter and setter methods, by using a java.beans.BeanInfo class associated with your form bean. Normally, however, it is much more convenient to follow the standard conventions. WARNING - developers might be tempted to use one of the following techniques, but any of them will cause your property not to be recognized by the JavaBeans introspection facilities, and therefore cause your applications to misbehave: * Using getter and setter method names that do not match - if you have a getFoo() method for your getter, but a setBar() method for your setter, Java will not recognize these methods as r