Spring webflow + CAS : AuthenticationViaFormAction class is not called
<p>My application uses CAS 3.4.11, Spring 3.1 and Hibernate 4.
My login-webflow.xml uses spring-webflow-2.0.xsd and the login flow is given below,</p>

<pre><code>&lt;var name="credentials" class="org.jasig.cas.authentication.principal.UsernamePasswordCredentials" /&gt;

   &lt;on-start&gt;
     &lt;evaluate expression="initialFlowSetupAction" /&gt;
   &lt;/on-start&gt;

   &lt;view-state id="viewLoginForm" view="casLoginView" model="credentials"&gt;
     &lt;binder&gt;
       &lt;binding property="username" /&gt;
       &lt;binding property="password" /&gt;
     &lt;/binder&gt;
     &lt;on-entry&gt;
       &lt;set name="viewScope.commandName" value="'credentials'" /&gt;
     &lt;/on-entry&gt;
     &lt;transition on="submit" bind="true" validate="true" to="realSubmit"&gt;
        &lt;evaluate expression="authenticationViaFormAction.doBind(flowRequestContext, flowScope.credentials)" /&gt;
     &lt;/transition&gt;
   &lt;/view-state&gt;
</code></pre>

<p>The beans "initialFlowSetupAction" and "authenticationViaFormAction" are defined in cas-servlet.xml as,</p>

<pre><code>&lt;bean id="initialFlowSetupAction" class="org.jasig.cas.web.flow.InitialFlowSetupAction"
        p:argumentExtractors-ref="argumentExtractors"
        p:warnCookieGenerator-ref="warnCookieGenerator"
        p:ticketGrantingTicketCookieGenerator-ref="ticketGrantingTicketCookieGenerator"/&gt;

  &lt;bean id="authenticationViaFormAction" class="org.jasig.cas.web.flow.AuthenticationViaFormAction"
        p:centralAuthenticationService-ref="centralAuthenticationService"
        p:warnCookieGenerator-ref="warnCookieGenerator"/&gt;
</code></pre>

<p>The issue here is, the InitialFlowSetupAction is called while launch the login page. On click of "Sign In" button the bind/submit method of AuthenticationViaFormAction class should be invoked. But always the InitialFlowSetupAction is called and the form is redisplayed with out any exception. Atleast I could track if there is an exception. </p>

<p>Can it be a binding issue with username and password fields of the form to set its properties to UsernamePasswordCredentials? </p>

<p>Basically I would like to know why InitialFlowSetupAction is invoked onclick of "Sign In" button?</p>
