In Form Controller is there an initial function that gets called?

[blueskies]

I need some way to initialize some flags and such. Right now it's all going into the formBackingObject function but I feel that this is stuff that is unrelated to the actual form object. I can't figure out what other methods are called first that I can override to initialize some session data.

[Marten Deinum]

I strongly suggest that you read chapter 13 (http://static.springframework.org/docs/reference/mvc.html) of the reference guide, also take a close look at the sample application shipped with Spring. Next to that take a look at the javadocs of the SimpleFormController (http://www.springframework.org/docs/api/org/springframework/web/servlet/mvc/SimpleFormController.html)