Accessing application methods from EL

Question

Hi all,
I do not consider myself a newbie but I wonder sometimes when I can't solve these problem; Tomcat can be such a bugger to configure, especially when they change the schemas on every release.
Anyway. I have a couple custom tags in my header.jspf file. I use the <c:import> action to include it in all documents on that virtual host.
This is how I originally achieve this task:
<c:import url="http://home.localhost/templates/header.jspf">
     <c:param name="newsData" value="http://home.localhost/news/news_2004-06-27.xml" />
     <c:param name="menuData" value="<%= application.getRealPath("WEB-INF/home-menu.xml") %>" />
</c:import>Now I have decided to make everything xHTML compliant i.e. I no longer want to use and can not use <% ... %> scriptlet tags any more.
I do not know however, how to call methods such as application.getRealPath(...) from, EL for example?
How can I accomplish this?
I'm hoping for something like:
<c:import url="http://home.localhost/templates/header.jspf">
     <c:param name="newsData" value="http://home.localhost/news/news_2004-06-27.xml" />
     <c:param name="menuData" value="${application.getRealPath("WEB-INF/home-menu.xml")}" />
</c:import>I think instead of using application I have to use servletContext, but I do not know if a attribute key/value exists that represents the servlet-path.
Any and all help appreciates.
Kind Regards,
Darren Bishop

Answer 1

Hey evnafets,
Thanks for your comback.
I had actually exhaustively tried everything, including your suggestion
${pageContext.servletContext.realPath}I solved it in the end with the following:
<jsp:scriptlet>
     pageContext.setAttribute("menuData", application.getRealPath("WEB-INF/home-menu.xml"));
</jsp:scriptlet>
<c:import url="http://home.localhost/templates/header.jspf">
     <c:param name="newsData" value="http://home.localhost/news/news_2004-06-27.xml" />
     <c:param name="menuData" value="${menuData}" />
</c:import>I previously did not know that JSP scripting syntax had been changed to XML elements. It works fine but I do not like it at all... effectively Java code still remains in the page which I am not happy about; wanted clean XML code, I suppose with my definition of clean not beingthe above.
I am familiar with JSTL functions, but I can be quite stubborn if it seems that the functionality should already exist; why does the application/servletContext not have an attribute REAL_PATH or something. Then you can concatenate anything you want on the end.
Again, thanksfor reply.
Regards,
Darren B