JSP Tutorial - JSP XML

Sending XML from a JSP

To send XML data as a page back to client, set the content type of your page to text/xml.

<%@ page contentType="text/xml" %>

Full code:

<%@ page contentType="text/xml" %>
<books>
   <book>
      <name>JSP</name>
      <author>java2s.com</author>
      <price>123</price>
   </book>
</books>

Parse XML in JSP

To parse XML using JSP, install the following two XML and XPath libraries into your <Tomcat Installation Directory>\lib:

XercesImpl.jar from http://www.apache.org/dist/xerces/j/
xalan.jar from http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/index.html

First, create the books.xml file as follows:

<books>
<book>
  <name>JSP</name>
  <author>java2s.com</author>
</book>
<book>
  <name>Servlet</name>
  <author>java2s.com</author>
</book>
</books>

Create the following main.jsp in the same folder with the above xml file.

<%@ taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" %>
<%@ taglib prefix="x" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/xml" %>
 
<html>
<body>
<c:import var="bookInfo" url="http://localhost:8080/books.xml"/>
<x:parse xml="${bookInfo}" var="output"/>
<b>The title of the first book is</b>: 
<x:out select="$output/books/book[1]/name" />
</body>
</html>

Access above JSP using http://localhost:8080/main.jsp.

Format/Transform XML in JSP with XSLT

First, create the following XSLT stylesheet style.xsl:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl=
"http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
<xsl:output method="html" indent="yes"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
  <html>
  <body>
   <xsl:apply-templates/>
  </body>
  </html>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="books">
  <table border="1" width="100%">
    <xsl:for-each select="book">
      <tr>
        <td>
          <i><xsl:value-of select="name"/></i>
        </td>
        <td>
          <xsl:value-of select="author"/>
        </td>
        <td>
          <xsl:value-of select="price"/>
        </td>
      </tr>
    </xsl:for-each>
  </table>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Apply the above style sheet within JSP file.

<%@ taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" %>
<%@ taglib prefix="x" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/xml" %>
<html>
<body>
<c:set var="xmltext">
  <books>
    <book>
      <name>JSP</name>
      <author>java2s.com</author>
      <price>100</price>
    </book>
    <book>
      <name>Servlet</name>
      <author>java2s.com</author>
      <price>2000</price>
    </book>
  </books>
</c:set>
 
<c:import url="http://localhost:8080/style.xsl" var="xslt"/>
<x:transform xml="${xmltext}" xslt="${xslt}"/>
 
</body>
</html>