JSP with servlet content

Question

hello, i am currently writing a search engine, i have written a servlet which connects to and queries a Microsoft SQL server database and then writes the results to the page seen by the user, Formatting the output text through a servlet is however very teedious, is there any way that i could call the servlet from within a jsp scriptlet or expression, and have the formatted string (HTML) returned and printed to the place that it was called (the scriptlet or expression) on the jsp. Any other methods would me more than welcome.
Also, i would like to know how to read in a text/html file from within a servlet i have tried putting the file in the same folder as the class ( "web-inf/classes" ) and just creating a FileReader object with the file name as the parameter, however i get a file not found error.
Thanks in advance
Arnold Oree

Answer 1

You can incluse the output from a servlet in your jsp page using the include tag. You can also pass parameters to the servlet like the example below shows (but doesn't have to use a complicated technique like I used ...it could just be a hardcoded value).
  <jsp:include page='servlet/counter' flush='true'>
    <jsp:param name='counter'
       value='<%="portaluser_"+session.getAttribute("userName")%>'/>
  </jsp:include>You could use a cheat like this to see where your container is 'rooting' from regarding reading from the local filesystem. Different setups might give different results.
      File f = new File("Hi.dat");
      System.out.println(f.getAbsolutePath());However, sometimes people use an absolute path and allow that to be configured in the web.xml file.
  <servlet>
    <servlet-name>counter</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>com.GumBTech.servlet.Counter</servlet-class>
    <init-param>
      <param-name>countfile</param-name>
      <param-value>E:\security\counts.ser</param-value>
    </init-param>
  </servlet>Then you just read the value from the servlets init method.
  public void init(ServletConfig config) throws ServletException {
    super.init(config);
    try {
      // Get the save file.
      countfile = new File(config.getInitParameter("countfile"));
      // ...etc, etc...I hope this gives you some ideas.