Validation prevents Action from creating session scope object

[Robert Miller <rm...@ofumic.com>]

I have a Struts application that acts like a "wizard" (conditionally
displaying only relevant pages and skipping others based upon previous
user input). One of my pages collects multiple instances of a single
record by allowing data to be entered and displaying previous records in
a table. To accomplish this my Action class queries the contents of the
bean, which is my model, to determine if the JSP it supports should be
displayed.  If the JSP should be displayed, the Action creates necessary
objects (an ArrayList) setting them in the session (under the name of
"list") and forwards to the "use" mapping.  Otherwise the Action
class forwards to the "skip" mapping, bypassing this page. The JSP uses
the "logic:iterate" tags to display the contents of "list" from the
session in a table. When I hit the "Add" button on the page, the Action
(the same Action mentioned above, it handles both pre and post
processing for the page) takes my form bean and adds it to the ArrayList
and returns to the page where another entry is shown in the list of
records.  My problem is, when I tried to add validation all that I have
described broke. The browser displays "Error 500: Cannot find bean list
in any scope".  It is acting as though validation is bypassing my action
(and my initialization code) and going directly to the page.  Is this
possible? Do I have something configured wrong? I have other pages that
do not rely on preexisting classes in the session and they are
validating without problems. Thank you for your help.Robert