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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T08:55:22+00:00

I’m looking for help/advice with creating simple JSP website using equivalent of PHP include+switch

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I’m looking for help/advice with creating simple JSP website using equivalent of PHP include+switch function.

The goal is that I want to be able to switch between multiple JSP include pages in one main page.

What would be the simplest possible form of above ‘function’?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    There you have the <jsp:include> for. You can use EL to specify the page attribute.

    Create a /WEB-INF/main.jsp file which look like:

    <!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
    <head>
        <title>Title</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <jsp:include page="${page}" />
    </body>
</html>

    You can control the ${page} value with help of a page controller servlet. Something like:

    public class PageController extends HttpServlet {

    protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException {
        request.setAttribute("page", "/WEB-INF" + request.getPathInfo());
        request.getRequestDispatcher("/WEB-INF/main.jsp").forward(request, response);
    }

}

    Map this servlet in web.xml as follows:

    <servlet>
    <servlet-name>pageController</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>com.example.PageController</servlet-class>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>pageController</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/page/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

    This way the servlet is accessible through http://example.com/context/page/foo.jsp and in this URL example it will then get /foo.jsp from the pathinfo and thus set the page attribute with the value /WEB-INF/foo.jsp so that it is available in EL as ${page} so that the jsp:include knows what it should include. No need for nasty scriptlets or switch statements.

    In the /WEB-INF/foo.jsp you can just write down HTML as if it is placed inside the HTML <body> tag.

    Note that the JSP files are placed in /WEB-INF, this is done so to prevent direct access by URL so that the users cannot request them without going through the page controller, such as for example http://example.com/context/foo.jsp which would only return the partial content (the to-be-included page).

    Hope this helps.

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