Question

I have written a Servlet something like this

public class ServletUtil extends HttpServlet {

private static final long serialVersionUID = 1571172240732862415L;

public void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException {
    response.setContentType("text/html");
    PrintWriter out = response.getWriter();
    String acInfo = request.getQueryString();
    someDao dao = new someDao();
     ArrayList<String> resultAutoComplete=dao.someResults(acInfo);
    out.close();
}

}

I have an auto complete Object/wizard in front end and as the user types in it is making Ajax call to back end to grab the list of results. So I have written a Servlet and I am pulling the user input and getting my results from DAO layer.

My question here is how should I send this list(resultAutoComplete) to Front end in the Servlet?

Answer 1

I’d expect you to serialise this in some fashion such that the client understands it. e.g. perhaps using JSON or similar.

I note that your response content type is text/html. So why not simply write each element of your list to your Writer out, separated by (say) a <li> element (with the appropriate unordered/order list entities surrounding this)