title: JSP Dropdown List with Blank Default
body: <p>I have a JSP Dropdown that is populated from a database query, and it is working just fine.  </p>
  
  <p>But I want to also add a blank default option so that the field is empty when submitted.  Right now the default is the first value selected from the database.  But I want it to appear empty.</p>
  
  <p>The only way I've gotten it to work is to manually add a <strong><code>""</code></strong> to the list as it is being populated.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a more elegant way of doing that?</p>
  
  <pre><code>        &lt;div class="row"&gt;
              &lt;label class="span2"&gt;Action&lt;/label&gt;
              &lt;form:select path="Action"&gt;
                  &lt;form:options items="${actionList}" /&gt;
                  &lt;form:errors path="Action" cssClass="error"/&gt;
              &lt;/form:select&gt;
          &lt;/div&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Page with default values, which I do not want to appear by default:</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/ksC03.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>