Spring-Boot with JSP Tag Libs in embedded Tomcat

Question

I am currently migrating a Spring MVC Webapp (xml-config to java-config, tomcat to embedded tomcat via spring-boot).

The webapp uses freemarker as templating engine and JSP Taglibs. Now when I call a freemarker page I get the following error:

freemarker.ext.jsp.TaglibFactory$TaglibGettingException: 
No TLD was found for the "http://www.springframework.org/tags/form" JSP taglib URI. (TLD-s are searched according the JSP 2.2 specification. In development- and embedded-servlet-container setups you may also need the "MetaInfTldSources" and "ClasspathTlds" freemarker.ext.servlet.FreemarkerServlet init-params or the similar system properites.)

The freemarker-header.ftl begins with following snippet:

<#assign form=JspTaglibs["http://www.springframework.org/tags/form"]>
<#assign core=JspTaglibs["http://java.sun.com/jstl/core"]>
<#assign spring=JspTaglibs["http://www.springframework.org/tags"]>
<#assign osc=JspTaglibs["/WEB-INF/osc.tld"]>

I did not find any usable search results for MetaInfTldSources and ClasspathTlds. Any one solved this problem before?

KR Habib

Answer 1

Spring Boot doesn't support the use of JSP taglibs with Freemarker out of the box. There's an open enhancement request that you might be interested in. It contains a link to a possible workaround where you configure FreemarkerConfigurer's tag lib factory with some additional TLDs to be loaded from the classpath:

freeMarkerConfigurer.getTaglibFactory().setClasspathTlds(…);