JSP include directive not working with Tomcat 5.0

Question

Hi.
I'm developing a small JSF webapp under Tomcat 5.0. My idea was to use the include directive to display a navigation panel on every JSP page.
I took the code straight from the Java Web Services Tutorial; the resulting page looks like this:
<jsp:root xmlns:jsp="http://java.sun.com/JSP/Page"
          xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core"
          xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"
       version="2.0">
<jsp:directive.page contentType="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1"/>
<%@ include file="/jsp/panelpage_header.inc" %>
     <h:outputText value="Welcome!"/>
<%@ include file="/jsp/panelpage_footer.inc" %>
</jsp:root>However, when I try to load the page, a compilation error occurrs:
org.apache.jasper.JasperException: /trias/welcome2.jsp(11,2) The content of elements must consist of well-formed character data or markup.
     org.apache.jasper.compiler.DefaultErrorHandler.jspError(DefaultErrorHandler.java:39)
...I checked the path to the included files, and it seems to be okay. The files themselves contain the JSF tags for the view, html-head, html-body etc. The compiler doesn't even care if the files exist or not because it aborts immediately when it reaches the first include-statement.
Did anyone see this kind of error before?

Answer 1

Ok, the solution with jsp:directive.include works,
if header.inc and footer.inc themselves are well
formed too. If I understood the concept right this is
because header and footer are processed during
request time and therefore interpreted as
'standalone' pages.This isn't true. The include directive (<jsp:directive.include>) is run a Compile Time. The code is inserted directly into the surrounding JSP (unlike <jsp:include> which forwards the request at runtime). The finished JSP, after the include, is then processed and needs to be well-formed XML.
>
But: What can I do when these two files define a tag
that should enclose my current page (for example,
header opens a panelGrid-Tag, and footer closes it).
For this case I thought the use of the
@include-directive would be neccessary to combine the
three pages during compilation. By this the resulting
page would be well-formed although header and footer
are not.It should be, as long as you are using <jsp:directive.include>, and the rest of the included pages are also well formed (no <% %> tags, nothing else out of place...).
Honestly, I haven't done much work with JSP documents, so I haven't run into this problem. But I do believe everything I said is correct.
What I would do is double check the correctness of the rest of the included pages and see if your error isn't something else.