C:forEach and logic:iterate tags repeating elements of a collection

Question

I have an issue that makes absolutely no sense to me. Basically I am using struts, and I am returning a form that contains a List of customers. I am simply trying to iterate that list into a simple table for each customer. The end result will have rows for each table, but I tried to simplify this example.
The only filter is that I don't want to display customers that don't contain any data that I care to display. In my dataset, there is only one customer that has any data that I care about, and that has been verified in the database and in the backend action feeding the struts page.
I first attempted this with the c:forEach JSTL tag. What I saw was that the customers were just getting repeated. Instead of showing one table for each customer, it was repeating the tables for each customer equal to the size of the Collection. For example, there were *5* customers in the List, only customer C should have been set into a table, but the table for customer C was being repeated *5* times. I went into the backend code, and made sure the object being sent back to struts contained the correct number of records.
I then tried the same thing using the logic:iterate Struts EL tag. This did exactly the same thing. Instead of one table for customer C, I had 5 tables, all for customer C.
Frustrated, I then went back to just writing a basic scriptlet in the JSP, to iterate over the object returned from the struts action. When I did this, everything came back as normal. Only customer C met my conditional statement, and only customer C had a table created in the generated HTML.
Now I must be missing something with how the JSTL tags are handling the iteration, so I wanted to post the code to see if anyone had any idea what I am doing wrong here.
The JSP page is found below. As you can see, the first part is done as a scriptlet, and the last part is done with JSTL tags. Unless I am mistaken, the 2 approaches should produce the same result. Please let me know if I am missing something here.
<%@ include file="/common/customConfig.inc"%>
<%@ page import="java.util.Iterator,
    com.pw.cemp.webapp.common.forms.CempDocumentsForm,
    com.pw.cemp.webapp.common.views.CustomerView"%>
Write table with straight scriptlets...
<br />
<br />
<%
    CempDocumentsForm cdForm =
        (CempDocumentsForm) session.getAttribute("cempDocsForm");
    Iterator itCustomers = cdForm.getCustomers().iterator();
    while (itCustomers.hasNext())
        int idx = 0;
        CustomerView customer = (CustomerView) itCustomers.next();
        if (customer.getCemps() != null && !customer.getCemps().isEmpty())
%>
        <table>
            <% if (idx == 0) { %>
                <caption>
                    Customer CEMP Listing
                </caption>               
            <% } %>
            <tbody>
                <tr>
                    <td class="level1">
                        <%=customer.getName() %> -
                        <%=customer.getSapCustomerId() %>
                    </td>
                </tr>
            </tbody>
        </table>
<%      
        idx ++;
%>
<br />
<br />
Now try using JSTL...
<br />
<br />
    <logic:iterate name="cempDocsForm" property="customers" id="customer" indexId="index">
    <!-- <c:forEach items="${cempDocsForm.customers}" var="customer" varStatus="status"> -->
        <c:if test="${not empty customer.cemps}">           
        <table>
            <c:if test="${index == 0}">
                <caption>
                    Customer CEMP Listing
                </caption>
            </c:if>
            <tbody>
                <tr>
                    <td class="level1">
                        <c:out value="${customer.name}" /> -
                        <c:out value="${customer.sapCustomerId}" />
                    </td>
                </tr>
            </tbody>
        </table>
        </c:if>
    <!-- </c:forEach> -->
    </logic:iterate>
    <br />
    <br />The code above produced the following HTML. As you can see, the scriptlet did exactly what I wanted, it produced 1 table for the only company that met the conditional statement. The JSTL section repeated the table for that one company, equal to the number of items in my List.
Write table with straight scriptlets...
<br />
<br />
        <table>
                <caption>
                    Customer CEMP Listing
                </caption>                           
            <tbody>
                <tr>
                    <td class="level1">
                        FMP Test Company -
                        5
                    </td>
                </tr>
            </tbody>
        </table>
<br />
<br />
Now try using JSTL...
<br />
<br />
        <table>           
                <caption>
                    Customer CEMP Listing
                </caption>           
            <tbody>
                <tr>
                    <td class="level1">
                        FMP Test Company -
                        5
                    </td>
                </tr>
            </tbody>       
        </table>
        <table>
            <tbody>
                <tr>
                    <td class="level1">
                        FMP Test Company -
                        5
                    </td>
                </tr>
            </tbody>
        </table>
        <table>           
            <tbody>
                <tr>
                    <td class="level1">
                        FMP Test Company -
                        5
                    </td>
                </tr>
            </tbody>
        </table>
        <table>           
            <tbody>
                <tr>
                    <td class="level1">
                        FMP Test Company -
                        5
                    </td>
                </tr>
            </tbody>
        </table>
        <table>       
            <tbody>
                <tr>
                    <td class="level1">
                        FMP Test Company -
                        5
                    </td>
                </tr>
            </tbody>
        </table>
    <br />
    <br />Thanks in advance...
Edited by: cdbyrd on Feb 28, 2008 4:22 PM
Edited by: cdbyrd on Feb 28, 2008 5:12 PM

Answer 1

Okay, it looks like I kept moving things around until I stumbled upon something. One thing to note is that I am using Tiles in my struts 1.2.9 application. I don't know if that has anything to do with it, but this is what I found.
If you notice in my code, with the iteration tags, I had one active and one commented version of the tag. I kept flipping them around, thinking it was some kind of syntax problem or it was specific to either the logic:iterate or c:forEach tag.
Well, as it turns out, when you comment something the way I did, I think the custom tag processor doesn't ignore the commented sections. I had things commented like the following.
    <logic:iterate name="cempDocsForm" property="customers" id="customer" indexId="index">
    <!-- <c:forEach items="${cempDocsForm.customers}" var="customer" varStatus="status"> -->Now I have done this many times in the past, and I have never noticed any adverse behavior. I guess it was just the correct situation here to make the problem come to the surface. As soon as I removed any comments on the JSP, the page started working as expected. I can't explain why it happens, I just know it happened.
Does anyone out there have a good explanation for this, so I can put a reason to why I lost so much hair today? Also, does anyone have the proper way to comment out JSTL tags to keep them from being parsed?
Thanks...