Question

I have the need to pass an object from jstl to a Jquery click handler.

My UI displays a tree structure. The nodes which make up the tree use a name property which is the value displayed to the user. This name property is taken from a “node” object. Is there any way i can pass the “node” object into my jquery function when one of the nodes of the tree is clicked?

My jstl looks like this

<c:forEach var="node" items="${object.childItems}">
<li>
        <a href="#" class="node"><c:out value="${node.name}"/></a>
    <c:set var="node" value="${node}" scope="request"/> 
    <jsp:include page="child.jsp"/>
</li>
</c:forEach>

I then have a jquery click event attached to the “.node” class of each href. When the href is clicked i want to be able have access to all the values in “node” in my Jquery click handler. What is the best way to do this? Thanks

Answer 1

You have few options available depending on what you want to do?

1. You can store the node values in the HTML as IDs/hidden fields or using Data attributes then when in our click event handler you get use jQuery selector to build a JSON object.
2. You can just store the ID of the node then make an Ajax request to the server that can return a JSON object.

I normally use option 1 if all the data I need for the object is already being displayed on the page already to reduce the number of server calls.

Or option 2 if the object has extra fields you want to access in your but don’t need to display on the list to reduce the bloat in your HTML page.