form:select tag [chose one option as selected]

[raulsan]

Hi! I am doing a project for my university and I have been a while gloogling for a solution about how to select one of the options in a dropdown list, but I was not fortunate.
- I am using Hibernate and Spring MVC.
- I have an entity "patient" which has a field "country" of type String.

In one of the pages I have to edit the values of the patient and I need that the dropdown list is initialized with the correct value. I know how to retrieve the data and all that,
Which I do not know is how to translate:

<select>
   ........
  <option value="Greece" selected="selected">Greece</option>
  .........
</select>

What I have now and is working is:

<form:form commandName="commandPatient" method="POST" action="editPatient">
.................
<form:select path="country">
   <form:options items='${countries}'/>    
</form:select>
.................
</form:form>

So my question is: how do I select the value I want for the country?
I also have declared in my controller a variable with the desired value I want:

    protected Map referenceData(HttpServletRequest request) throws Exception {
    	Map<Object, Object> dataMap = new HashMap<Object, Object>();
    	dataMap.put("country", "Greece");
        return dataMap;
    }

I know there is a solution using

<spring:bind path="...">
       <select name="${status.expression}">
           <c:forEach items="${countries}" var="c">
........................
         </c:forEach>
       </select>
</spring>

as indicated in: http://www.jroller.com/raible/entry/...ith_spring_mvc
but I prefer to use the form:select tag
I just wished there was a "selected" tag
"Thank you for your help"