Question

Can I call a servlet from JSP file without using a HTML form?

For example, to show results from database in a HTML table during page load.

Answer 1

You can use the doGet() method of the servlet to preprocess a request and forward the request to the JSP. Then just point the servlet URL instead of JSP URL in links and browser address bar.

E.g.

@WebServlet("/products")
public class ProductsServlet extends HttpServlet {

    @EJB
    private ProductService productService;

    protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException {
        List<Product> products = productService.list();
        request.setAttribute("products", products);
        request.getRequestDispatcher("/WEB-INF/products.jsp").forward(request, response);
    }

}

<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" prefix="c" %>
...
<table>
    <c:forEach items="${products}" var="product">
        <tr>
            <td>${product.name}</td>
            <td>${product.description}</td>
            <td>${product.price}</td>
        </tr>
    </c:forEach>
</table>

Note that the JSP file is placed inside /WEB-INF folder to prevent users from accessing it directly without calling the servlet.

Also note that @WebServlet is only available since Servlet 3.0 (Tomcat 7, etc), see also @WebServlet annotation with Tomcat 7. If you can’t upgrade, or when you for some reason need to use a web.xml which is not compatible with Servlet 3.0, then you’d need to manually register the servlet the old fashioned way in web.xml as below instead of using the annotation:

<servlet>
    <servlet-name>productsServlet</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>com.example.ProductsServlet</servlet-class>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>productsServlet</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/products</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

Once having properly registered the servlet by annotation or XML, now you can open it by http://localhost:8080/context/products where /context is the webapp’s deployed context path and /products is the servlet’s URL pattern. If you happen to have any HTML <form> inside it, then just let it POST to the current URL like so <form method="post"> and add a doPost() to the very same servlet to perform the postprocessing job. Continue the below links for more concrete examples on that.

See also

• Our Servlets wiki page
• doGet and doPost in Servlets
• How to avoid Java code in JSP
• Servlet returns "HTTP Status 404 The requested resource (/servlet) is not available"