hello guys I'm using Spring 3.1 MVC and I have a simple search form:

HTML Code:
    <form:form id="formSearch" method="post" modelAttribute="searchCriteria" >
        <div id="freeflowlabel">   
            <p style="text-align:left;">
                <span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:16px;font-weight:bold;font-style:normal;text-decoration:none;color:#333333;">${configProperties['cat.search.title']}</span>
            </p>
        </div>       
        <form:input id="freeFlowInputId" path="freeFlowText" />
        <p></p>
        <div id="advancedSearch">

        </div>
        <!--input id="searchButtonId" type="submit" value=${configProperties['cat.search.button']} style="cursor: pointer;"-->

        <button id="loadDataButton" onClick="loadData()">Search</button>
    </form:form>
If I use the button submit (now commented) all is working well and in the server side I have the Model Attribute SearchCriteria containing the input inserted by the user in the form.

Since I would like to search and show a table I would like to update just the table doing an ajax request and this ajax request is executed inside the methos loadData() attached to the search button. In this case I tried three ways:

1) form.submit() nothing happen, on server side the bean has null attributes

2) I'm using YUI as form so I tried to serialize a form but I receive an error: application/x-www-form-urlencoded is not supported

3) I can do a serialization on JSON and send the form value in the body of the ajax POST request; this works but it's not so elegant and then I'm going to lose all the facility provided by form:tags....

How can I solve this problem?

I think that should be a relevant problem the interaction between Ajax and spring so I hope that there is a clean solution

thank you
Daniele Ippoliti