Question

I want to iterate a HashMap in javascript using jstl. is it possible to do like this?

function checkSelection(group,tvalue){
alert(group);
alert(tvalue);

<c:forEach items="${configuredGroupMap}" var="groupMap">
    alert("aa<c:out value="${groupMap.key}"/>");
    <c:if test="${groupMap.key==group}">
        alert("t<c:out value="${groupMap.key}"/>");
        <c:if test="${groupMap.value==tvalue}">
            alert("equal");
        </c:if>
    </c:if>
</c:forEach>
}

it’s not going inside after

 <c:if test="${groupMap.key==group}">

Answer 1

“to iterate a HashMap in javascript using jstl” – Not possible

JSTL is executed in server side by your servlet container for which Javascript is just a text which would be skipped whereas JavaScript is executed in client side where JSTL is unknown. After the server completes processing JSTL, the generated HTML(if any) from the JSTL along with other JavaScript/HTML will be rendered.

For example, if you have this,

<c:forEach var="myItem" items="${myCollection}">
alert('<c:out value="${myItem.id}">')
<c:if test="${myItem.id == 0}"> 
   alert("zero"); 
</c:if>
</c:forEach>

If the ids of the beans in the collection are 0, 1, 2, the server renders the following to the client side by executing the above code,

alert('0')
alert('zero')
alert('1')
alert('2')

Now the browser will give you 4 alerts on loading the page (what if you have 10000 items, you will render 10000 alert statements to the browser). So the point is that you haven’t iterated Java collection in JavaScript, you have simply generated a serious of Javascript statements in server iterating the collection using JSTL and you have provided those Javascript statements along with other html contents to browser.