JSTL EL expressions in JavaScript

Question

I'm new to JSTL. I'm using JSTL version 1.0 on Tomcat 4.1.37.
I've created a servlet that generates a list of items and sets them to the attribute of the request. I'm using the following code to populate a drop down menu using this list.
<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jstl/core" prefix="c" %>
<select id="myMenu" name="myMenu" onchange="foo();">
     <option value="">Select an item</option>
     <c:forEach var="someBean" items="${allBeans}">
          <option value="${someBean.id}">
               <c:out value="${someBean.name}" />
          </option>
     </c:forEach>
</select>When the page loads, I do see the proper list of names in the drop down menu as I would expect. So the values of someBean.name are being rendered properly.
When the user selects an item in the menu, the foo method executes in javascript. It looks like this
function foo() {
     var menu = document.getElementById("myMenu");
     var index = menu.selectedIndex;
     var id = menu[index].value;
     alert( "index = " + index + " id = " + id );
}I was assuming I would see the id values for the selected name. But I don't. Instead I see ..
index = 5 id = ${someBean.id}Can someone explain why? In other words I find that the EL expression pertaining to the name attribute of the bean is being properly evaluated, but the id EL expression is not being evaluated. Thanks in advance for any help.
Edited by: nantucket on Jun 23, 2008 10:57 AM

Answer 1

hi modify your code like this,
<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jstl/core" prefix="c" %>
<select id="myMenu" name="myMenu" onchange="foo();">
<option value="">Select an item</option>
<c:forEach var="someBean" items="${allBeans}">
{color:#339966}_*<option value="<c:out value='${someBean.id}'}">*_
{color}<c:out value="${someBean.name}" />
</option>
</c:forEach>
</select>
then you will get the expected result...
This is because normal HTML elements doesn't have capablity to render EL...