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springjspjstl

How to create hyperlink in Spring + JSP

What's the proper way to create a hyperlink in Spring+JSP? There must be a better way than just coding in the <a href="..."> tag. Take for example a page that displays people. The URL is people.htm. The corresponding controller gets people from the database and performs optional column sorting. The JSP might look like:

<table>
<tr>
  <td><a href="people.htm?sort=name">Name</a></td>
  <td><a href="people.htm?sort=age">Age</a></td>
  <td><a href="people.htm?sort=address">Address</a></td>
</tr>
...

This seems bad as the URL people.htm is hardcoded in the JSP. There should be a way to have Spring automatically build the <a> tag using the URL defined in servlet.xml.

Edit: Maybe I should be using a Spring form.

Solution

  • The only thing that comes to mind is the JSTL standard tag <c:url>. For example:

    <c:url var="thisURL" value="homer.jsp">
  <c:param name="iq" value="${homer.iq}"/>
  <c:param name="checkAgainst" value="marge simpson"/>
</c:url>
<a href="<c:out value="${thisURL}"/>">Next</a>

    Now this won't get you servlet mapping or the like but nothing will. It's not something you could really do programmatically (after all, a servlet can and usually does map to a range of URLs). But this will take care of escaping for you.