Jsp and ?: not working as expected

Question

I have this code:

<c:forEach var="product" items="${products}" begin="${begin}" end="${end}" varStatus="loopStatus" step="1">
    <div class="home_app "${loopStatus.index % 2 == 0 ? '' : 'white_bg'}">

When I browse to the jsp I am getting this in the div:

<div }="" white_bg="" :="" ?="" 0="" 2="=" %="" ${loopstatus.index="" class="home_app ">

Answer 1

The " before the dollar sign seems to be at the wrong place. Remove it.

Answer 2

Try this (change in bold):

<c:forEach var="product"
           items="${products}"
           begin="${begin}"
           end="${end}"
           varStatus="loopStatus"
           step="1">
    <div class="${loopStatus.index % 2 == 0 ? '' : 'white_bg'}">

My personal preference is the following instead of the ?: operator:

<c:choose>
    <c:when test="${(loopStatus.index % 2) == 1}">
        <div>
    </c:when>
    <c:otherwise>
        <div class="white_bg">
    </c:otherwise>
</c:choose>

Answer 3

The conditional operator (and EL in template text) was introduced in JSP 2.0. Chances are that you're running a servletconainer which doesn't support JSP 2.0 or is declaring web.xml as Servlet 2.2 or older.