title: How to retrieve multiple values from the select field using Commons File Upload?
body: <p><strong>Update:</strong> The problem ended up being the Flash component itself. It wasn't properly compiling the multiple values from the  element. I notified the developers and they implemented a workaround. Commons FileUpload does support multiple values per the accepted answer.</p>
  
  <p>I have a form, <em>enctype="multipart/form-data"</em>, with one </p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;select name="XX" multiple="multiple"&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and a Flash upload component which allows the user to select multiple files. When handling the POST using Apache Commons FileUpload, I detect the <em>select</em> field via </p>
  
  <pre><code>item.isFormField() == true
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and continue to extract the details via</p>
  
  <pre><code>// Process a regular form field
  if (item.isFormField()) {
      String name = item.getFieldName();
      String value = item.getString();
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The problem I'm having is that <strong>item.getString();</strong> returns only the first selected value from the <em>select</em> field; no matter how many items I pick, I only get the first item.</p>
  
  <p>Likewise, when I use the standard servlet method for parameter extraction, ie.</p>
  
  <pre><code>final String[] values = request.getParameterValues("XX");
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>values is empty, which I assume is because the form is encoded multipart.</p>
  
  <p>How can I retrieve these multiple selected values from my multi-select field?</p>
  
  <p>This (unanswered) question has also been <a href="http://forums.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=5395587" rel="nofollow noreferrer">posed on the Sun forums</a> by another author.</p>