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Web Server Java -- Servlets and JSP

JSP Include/Forward

You want to write a "page-composite" JSP that includes other pages or passes control to another page.

Use <jsp:include> or <jsp:forward>.


Suppose you have some common HTML code that you want to appear on every page, such as a navigator or header. You could copy it into each HTML and JSP file, but if it changed, you'd have to find all the files that used it and update each of them. It would be much easier to have one copy and include it everywhere you need it. Most webs servers feature such a mechanism already (e.g., server-side includes). However, using JSP's mechanism has some advantages, such as the ability to attach objects to a request, a topic I'll explore in JavaServer Pages Using a Servlet.

The basic mechanism is simply to have <jsp:include> with a PAGE attribute naming the page to be included, and end with </jsp:include>. For convenience, you can put the / at the end of the opening tag and omit the closing tag. Much of this syntax is taken from XML namespaces (see Chapter 21). The FLUSH attribute is also required, and it must have the value TRUE; this is to remind you that, once you do an include, the contents of the output are actually written. Therefore, you can no longer do anything that involves sending HTTP headers, such as changing content type or transferring control using an HTTP redirect request. So a full JSP include might look like this:

<H2>News of the day</H2>
<jsp:include page="./news.jsp" flush="true" />

The jsp:forward request is similar to a jsp:include, but you don't get control back afterwards. The attribute flush="true" is required on some JSP engines (including the release of Tomcat at the time this book went to press) to remind you that once you do this include, you have committed your output (prior to the include, the output might be all in a buffer). Therefore, as I just stated, you can no longer do anything that might generate headers, including setContentType(), sendRedirect( ), and so on.

An alternate include mechanism is <%@include file="filename"%>. This mechanism is a bit more efficient (the inclusion is done at the time the JSP is being compiled), but is limited to including text files (the file is read, rather than being processed as an HTTP URL; so if you include, say, a CGI script, the contents of your CGI script are revealed in the JSP output: not useful!). The <jsp:include> can include a URL of any type (HTML, servlet, JSP, CGI, even PHP or ASP).

JavaServer Pages Using a Servlet

It may seem that servlets and JSPs are mutually exclusive, but in fact they work well together. You can reduce the amount of Java coding in your JSP by passing control from a servlet to a JSP.

Use the Model-View-Controller paradigm, and implement it using ServletDispatcher().forward( ).


Model-View-Controller is a paradigm for building programs that interact well with the user. The Model is an object or collection that represents your data; the View is what the user sees; and the Controller responds to user request. Think of a slide-show (presentation) program: you probably have a text view, a slide view, and a sorter view. Yet when you change the data in any view, all the other views are updated immediately. This is because MVC allows a single model to have multiple views attached to it. MVC provides the basis for most well-designed GUI applications.

Using the Model-View-Controller paradigm, a servlet can be the controller and the JSP can be the view. A servlet, for example, could receive the initial request from the form, interrogate a database based upon the query, construct a collection of objects matching the user's query, and forward it to a JSP to be displayed (the servlet can attach data it found to the request). A good example of this is a search page, which might have only a few (or even one) form parameters, so using a JSP with a bean to receive the results would be overkill. A better design is to have a servlet retrieve the form parameter and contact the search API or database. From there, it would retrieve a list of pages matching the query. It could package these into a Vector or ArrayList, attach this to the request, and forward it to a JSP for formatting.

The basic syntax of this is:

ArrayList searchResultsList = // get from the query
RequestDispatcher disp;
disp = getServletContext( ).getRequestDispatcher("searchresults.jsp");
request.setAttribute("my.search.results", searchResultsList);
disp.forward(request, response);

This causes the servlet to pass the search results to the JSP. The JSP can retrieve the result set using this code:

ArrayList myList = (ArrayList) request.getAttribute("my.search.results");

You can then use a for loop to print the contents of the search request. Note that the URL in the getRequestDispatcher( ) call must be a call to the same web server, not to a server on a different port or machine.


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