Best practice of getting request parameters in JSP page

Question

int period_Id = 0;
try
period_Id = Integer.parseInt(request.getParameter("period_id"));
catch(Exception e)
  period_Id = 0;
}This is the normal way we use to get parameters from previous page.
But I am not sure if it is thebest practice.
Please respond if anyone knows a better way.
Regards

Answer 1

Using java code in a JSP is a horrible practice. There are far better ways to write JSP's nowadays in the form of custom tags, JSTL and possibly JSF. Combined with servlets this will make your code clean, reusable and maintainable.
However if you insist and using scriptlets, I'd say create your own request bean that wraps around the HttpServletRequest and write methods getParameterInt(), getParameterDouble(), etc. Such a method could look like this:
public int getParameterInt(String name, int default)
String paramstr = request.getParameter(name);
if(paramstr == null || paramstr.length() == 0){
  return default;
try{
   return Integer.parseInt(paramstr);
} catch(Exception e) {
  return default;
}With such a bean you never have to do that exception catching yourself again: you can just pass the parameter name and a default value that will be returned if the parameter does not exist or is not a valid integer.