Help with forEach loop

Question

I have a JSTL forEach loop similar to below:
<c:forEach var="product" items="${sessionScope.products}">
     <tr><td>${product.description}</td></tr>
</c:forEach>I would like to use a static class to format the description. Something like below, but I know I cannot do it this way. How can I accomplish this?
<tr><td>${ProductFormatter.getHtmlDescription(product)}</td></tr>thanks

Answer 1

The least change approach. If you have already have a static function to do this, then a function tag would be appropriate.
The function tag basically lets you call a static function from EL.
custom.tld
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<taglib xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee web-
        jsptaglibrary_2_1.xsd" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
     xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" version="2.1"
>
     <tlib-version>1.0</tlib-version>
     <short-name>my</short-name>
     <uri>http://www.mytags.com/</uri>
     <function>
          <name>productFormatter</name>
          <function-class>com.mypackage.ProductFormatter</function-class>
          <function-signature>java.lang.String getHtmlDescription(com.mypackage.Product)</function-signature>
     </function>     
</taglib>If you include that tld in your WEB-INF directory, then the following in a JSP should work:
<%@ taglib uri="http://www.mytags.com/" prefix="my"%>
<c:forEach var="product" items="${sessionScope.products}">
     <tr><td>${my:productFormatter(product)}</td></tr>
</c:forEach>Rather than putting the code in a static function, you might be better off encoding the logic into a custom tag. It depends on what your formatting function is like.
cheers,
evnafets