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Asked: 2026-05-24T23:33:07+00:00

I have a page which uses a tag template. My web.xml is very basic.

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I have a page which uses a tag template.
My web.xml is very basic.

I simply want to run some code in the page.
And no, I’m not interested in tags or other alternative. I want to use the bad-practice scriptlet haha.

So far I’m getting this “HTTP ERROR 500” error:

Scripting elements ( %!, jsp:declaration, %=, jsp:expression, %, jsp:scriptlet ) are disallowed here.

While my files look like:

/WEB-INF/web.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<web-app xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" xmlns:web="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee
http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd"
    version="2.5">

    <welcome-file-list>
        <welcome-file>index.html</welcome-file>
        <welcome-file>index.jsp</welcome-file>
    </welcome-file-list>
</web-app>

/WEB-INF/tags/wrapper.tag

<%@tag description="Simple Wrapper Tag" pageEncoding="UTF-8"%>
<%@ attribute name="title" required="true" type="java.lang.String"%>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<html>
<head>
<title>${title}</title>
</head>

<body>
    <jsp:doBody />
</body>
</html>

index.jsp

<%@page contentType="text/html" pageEncoding="UTF-8"%>
<%@taglib prefix="t" tagdir="/WEB-INF/tags"%>

<t:wrapper>
    <jsp:attribute name="title">My nice title</jsp:attribute>

    <jsp:body>
    <h1><%="some code generated text"%></h1>
    </jsp:body>
</t:wrapper>

I have tried to modify web.xml to explicitly enable it, like this (not working):

<jsp-config>
    <jsp-property-group>
        <url-pattern>*.jsp</url-pattern>
        <scripting-invalid>false</scripting-invalid>
    </jsp-property-group>
    <jsp-property-group>
        <url-pattern>*.tag</url-pattern>                
        <scripting-invalid>false</scripting-invalid>
    </jsp-property-group>
</jsp-config>

So, how do I use pure scriptlets within my tag’ed JSP?

EDIT #1:

An ideal code would look like this, inside a page that uses my template (‘wrapper’ as the above):

<%@page import="java.util.Calendar"%>
<%@page contentType="text/html" pageEncoding="UTF-8"%>
<%@taglib prefix="t" tagdir="/WEB-INF/tags"%>

<t:wrapper>
    <jsp:attribute name="title">My nice title</jsp:attribute>

    <%
        final int day_of_week = Calendar.getInstance().get(
                Calendar.DAY_OF_WEEK);
        if (day_of_week == Calendar.SATURDAY)
        {
    %>
    <jsp:body>
    <h1>Have a nice Saturday (<%=Integer.toString(day_of_week)%>)!</h1>
    </jsp:body>
    <%
        }
        else
        {
    %>
    <jsp:body>
    <h1>Have a nice rest-of-the-week (<%=Integer.toString(day_of_week)%>)!</h1>
    </jsp:body>
    <%
        }
    %>
</t:wrapper>

See? Scriptlets between & inside the ” tags. That’s exactly what I’m trying to achieve.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    In this case, the container doesn’t care about the value of scripting-invalid in web.xml because its looking at the tag meta-data for jsp:body which has a body-content value of scriptless. So when you see:

    Scripting elements ( %!, jsp:declaration, %=, jsp:expression, %, jsp:scriptlet ) are disallowed here.

    The container is complaining about the contents of jsp:body which must be scriptless. If you want to render scriptlet content in the body, you can set it as a page attribute outside of the jsp:body tag using a scriptlet and then render it using EL inside the body like so:

    <% request.setAttribute("stuff", object); %>

<jsp:body>
${stuff}
</jsp:body>
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