We are going to use JSTL and custom JSTL-tags for some sort of template-engine in our JSP/spring-project.
Is there a way to create a tag that looks similar like this:
<div id="site">
<div id="header">Some title</div>
<div id="navigation"> SOME DYNAMIC CONTENT HERE </div>
<div id="content"> ${content} </div>
<div id="footer"></div>
</div>
and use it like this:
<mytags:template>
<h1>Title</h1>
<p>My content!</p>
</mytags:template>
i.e. use body-content inside a custom JSTL-tag...
This works:
<mytags:template content="some content... not HTML" />
but is not very useful in our case.
Similar to McDowell's answer, but with more flexibility, is to declare an attribute that is a fragment. http://java.sun.com/j2ee/1.4/docs/tutorial/doc/JSPTags5.html#wp89854
e.g., //foo.tag tag file
<%@ attribute name="greeting" fragment="true" %>
<%@ attribute name="body" fragment="true" %>
<h1><jsp:invoke fragment="greeting" /></h1>
<p>body: <em><jsp:invoke fragment="body" /></em></p>
jsp file
<x:foo>
<jsp:attribute name="greeting"><b>a fancy</b> hello</jsp:attribute>
<jsp:attribute name="body"><pre>more fancy body</pre></jsp:attribute>
</x:foo>
this will produce this markup:
<h1><b>a fancy</b> hello</h1>
<p>body: <em><pre>more fancy body</pre></em></p>
</body>
The main advantage is to be able to have two fragments, instead of just one with a tag.