Pre-populate dropdown selections Spring MVC 2.5

[jamesEston]

Hello All,
I'm new to Spring and need to populate a select box with dates from a service call to a database before the jsp form loads. I'm using the SimpleFormController and wasn't sure how to do this? I have a controller that is setup and working to get the form submission and call another service, but I want to access a date populater service before the page loads to get these dates pre-populated for the user to select for some additional submission criteria. I read that you can use a formBackingObject for something like this. Is this the best way and does anyone have any basic examples?

Thanks,
James

Well, from what I could gather, I came up with some code that worked. Not sure if this is the right way to do it, but I used:
<code>
@Override
protected Object formBackingObject(HttpServletRequest request)
throws Exception {
List<Date> datesList = xxxService.getDates();
request.setAttribute("datesList", datesList);
return super.formBackingObject(request);
}
<code>
The form backing object seemed to be the correct way to do this, but is it a best practice to manually set the request object with the results of the service call?

Well, yes you can use the formBackingObject, but I realize now that is really for form selection data. To pre-populate the form you use the referenceData method and it worked fine.