Question

I have a search function that returns an arraylist of objects to my form. I am iterating through the list using JSTL’s foreach tags.

<c:forEach items="${searchResults}" var="contact" varStatus="loop">
<div style="padding: 5px;">
${contact.firstName} ${contact.lastName}
<br>
${contact.primaryPhone}
<br>

//Is this the proper way to set up the url?
<a href="Contacts?search=${param.search}&id=${loop.index}">View Contact</a>

</div>
<br>
</c:forEach>

When the user clicks the link inside each row, the row index is passed to the querystring and at this point I would like to show a div that contains additional information about the user.

I have a javascript function that I use to display the div and center it on the screen bla bla bla, but my question is how do I refresh the page with the index loaded into the querystring and then fire my javascript function?

I considered using:

<c:if test="${not empty param.id}">
//Check if id in querystring is available and if so, display popup
</c:if>

To check if there was an index available in the querystring, but I don’t think there is a way to fire my function from within a JSTL tag.

Should I be doing something on the server side when I request back to the servlet rather than trying to handle this on the client side? I just figure its a waste to requery my database and set another request parameter, when I already have the information I need stored in a parameter than I am using to display my list anyways.

Answer 1

The solution I eventually came up with is to check for my id parameter in the querystring each time the page loads (with javascript)

function init(){
console.log("Contacts page loaded.");

//Loads popup if 'id' is present in the querystring.
if(getQuerystring('id', 'null') !== 'null') {
    showCenteredDiv('popup');
}
};

The function I use to check the querystring is:

//Search querystring for a specific parameter. Second arg is the value to display if its not found.
function getQuerystring(key, default_)
{
  if (default_==null) default_="";

  key = key.replace(/[\[]/,"\\\[").replace(/[\]]/,"\\\]");
  var regex = new RegExp("[\\?&]"+key+"=([^&#]*)");
  var qs = regex.exec(window.location.href);

  if(qs == null) {
    return default_;
  } else {
    return qs[1];
  }
}