Jsp static import

Question

I've created a Spring Roo project. Everything looks fine. Now I want to add a form with a text input and a button to my index.jspx. This form will change a static field currentUser in my ToDo class. So I'm adding:

<form>
  <%@ page import="static com.mypack.domain.ToDo.*" %>
   <label for="_username_id">My name is:</label>
    <% currentUser = request.getParameter("username"); %>
             <input type="text"  id="username" name="username" maxlength="30" path="username" size="0" value="<%= currentUser %>"/>
             <input type="submit"/>
</form>

somewhere in the middle of it. And now it won't work:

This page contains the following errors:

error on line 6 at column 20: StartTag: invalid element name
Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.

function readCookie(name) { var nameEQ = name + '='; var ca = document.cookie.split(';'); for(var i=0;i

If I comment the lines above, it works just fine. What is wrong? Is there a way to write a value to a static field of a class from a jsp page? How do I work around this?

Answer 1

Just use EL. The request parameters are available by ${param.name}.

<input type="text" name="username" value="${param.username}" />

You only need to take XSS into account as well. Use JSTL fn:escapeXml for this:

<input type="text" name="username" value="${fn:escapeXml(param.username)}" />

Don't use scriptlets (those <% %> things). They are considered bad practice.

That the ToDo.currentUser is a static field also doesn't sound good. Its value would be shared among all requests/sessions in the webapplication. Different visitors will see the same value and any modifications will be reflected to all visitors. Is that what you want?