passion4java: JSP Page encoding can’t be Dynamic?

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

JSP Page encoding can’t be Dynamic?

Yesterday I had a interesting problem, I want to send page encoding as a dynamic attribute to the JSP pages. Currently all jsp’s we are using “UTF-8” encoding as hard coded string, but we want this to be dynamic and it should come from Server (or anywhere from java class ).

<%@ page language="java" import="java.text.*" pageEncoding="UTF-8"%>

In above code snippets I was trying to inject the pageEncoding value as dynamic value (by using the evil Scriptlets) as below.

<%@ page language="java" import="java.text.*" pageEncoding="<%=pageEncodingString%>"%>

But Eclipse was shouting that it was not valid pageEncoding value.Then I realized that in @page attribute you can’t give a Scriptlets value… I am not sure is there any other way we can achieve this ? ….

I came to another way by searching google (as usual) , that nothing but adding a jsp-property-group attribute in section (in web.xml file).

<jsp-config> <jsp-property-group> <url-pattern>*.jsp</url-pattern> <page-encoding>UTF-8</page-encoding> </jsp-property-group> </jsp-config>

You know how above code snippets work? It’s quite simple . You don’t need to add the pageEncoding="UTF-8" attributes in @page directive for all your Jsp files. If you make changes here it will affect all you jsp’s (based on your url-pattern).
Class : org.apache.jasper.compiler.JspConfig

But this also doen’t serve my purpose, the reason I have to change the encoding value which coming the Backend layer. I gone little bit further and found that there is some apache API to get the values of jsp-config in java class. When I saw that API I can find only the get methods and not the set methods. So again that doesn’t serve my purpose.
I still feel there should be some way to achieve this. If you guys have any thoughts please feel free post your replies here.

Finally welcome to my blog :)