Question

I am still trying to get my head around how client server comms work with JSP/js and Struts.
I have a Struts property in my action that I can display on my page using
As I understand it this works by looking in my Action for a method called getMyMessage(). So this works ok for me.
I now want to be able to access this value from inside my Javascript so I can dynamically populate a test area when the page loads.
I use

$(document).ready(function( data )
{
$('#contextsTextArea').html(data.myMessage);
});

but this does not work. I know I could assign a var in my JSP that stores the struts property and reference this var in my JS but is there a cleaner way to do this?

Answer 1

JSP runs on the server, JavaScript runs in your browser.

You cannot use a JSP variable like ‘myMessage’ as a variable in your JavaScript. You can, however, turn it into text on the server so it works as JS when it gets to your browser.
So, try something like this:

$('#contextsTextArea').val('<s:property value="myMessage"/>')

When this JSP is processed on the server the JS code will be left as text while the tag will be turned into the text in your myMessage variable.

Note that you really need to JS escape myMessage otherwise, for example, if the message contains a single quote then the JS will break.

Have a look at your page source to understand what’s going on here.