Java: How will you create custom tags for JSP?

A custom tag is a user-defined JSP language element. When a JSP page containing a custom tag is translated into a servlet, the tag is converted to operations on an object called a tag handler. The Web container then invokes those operations when the JSP page's servlet is executed.
JSP tag extensions let you create new tags that you can insert directly into a JavaServer Page just as you would the built-in tags you learned about in earlier chapter. The JSP 2.0 specification introduced Simple Tag Handlers for writing these custom tags.
To write a customer tab you can simply extend SimpleTagSupport class and override the doTag() method, where you can place your code to generate content for the tag.

Create "Hello" Tag:

Consider you want to define a custom tag named <ex:Hello> and you want to use it in the following fashion without a body:

<ex:Hello />

To create a custom JSP tag, you must first create a Java class that acts as a tag handler. So let us create HelloTag class as follows:

package com.tutorialspoint;

import javax.servlet.jsp.tagext.*;
import javax.servlet.jsp.*;
import java.io.*;

public class HelloTag extends SimpleTagSupport {

  public void doTag() throws JspException, IOException {
    JspWriter out = getJspContext().getOut();
    out.println("Hello Custom Tag!");
  }
}

Above code has simple coding where doTag() method takes the current JspContext object using getJspContext() method and uses it to send "Hello Custom Tag!" to the current JspWriter object.
Let us compile above class and copy it in a directory available in environment variable CLASSPATH. Finally create following tag library file: <Tomcat-Installation-Directory>webapps\ROOT\WEB-INF\custom.tld.

<taglib>
  <tlib-version>1.0</tlib-version>
  <jsp-version>2.0</jsp-version>
  <short-name>Example TLD</short-name>
  <tag>
    <name>Hello</name>
    <tag-class>com.tutorialspoint.HelloTag</tag-class>
    <body-content>empty</body-content>
  </tag>
</taglib>

Now it's time to use above defined custom tag Hello in our JSP program as follows:

<%@ taglib prefix="ex" uri="WEB-INF/custom.tld"%>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>A sample custom tag</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <ex:Hello/>
  </body>
</html>

Try to call above JSP and this should produce following result:

Hello Custom Tag!

Java

Thursday, February 6, 2014

How will you create custom tags for JSP?

Create "Hello" Tag:

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