Question

I’m using java server pages for the first time and I’m having a problem with tags. I am also working in Eclipse, if that’s relevant.

The specific error I’m getting is:

org.apache.jasper.JasperException: /Query.jsp (line: 5, column: 0) No tag "choose" defined in tag library imported with prefix "c"

The problem is, there is a tag “choose” with a prefix c…

I was having trouble with the urls that are usually recommended, it seems some of them are outdated, so I downloaded the standard tags and extracted them into my WEB-INF/tags directory.

My jsp file starts out with:

<%@ page contentType="text/html" import="beans.*" %>
<%@ taglib prefix="c" tagdir="/WEB-INF/tags/c.tld" %>
<%@ taglib prefix="sql" tagdir="/WEB-INF/tags/sql.tld" %>
<%@ taglib prefix="fn" tagdir="/WEB-INF/tags/fn.tld" %>    
<c:choose>
....

c.tld has:

...
<tag>
    <description>
        Simple conditional tag that establishes a context for
        mutually exclusive conditional operations, marked by
        &lt;when&gt; and &lt;otherwise&gt;
    </description>
    <name>choose</name>
    <tag-class>org.apache.taglibs.standard.tag.common.core.ChooseTag</tag-class>
    <body-content>JSP</body-content>
</tag>

It’s my guess that there’s some sort of configuration error somewhere, but I’m totally clueless about where it might be.

Answer 1

Your taglib declarations are wrong. Replace this:

<%@ taglib prefix="c" tagdir="/WEB-INF/tags/c.tld" %>

with this:

<%@ taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core"%>

and make sure it’s not (as some ancient tutorials say):

<%@ taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jstl/core"%>

… and repeat for the other libraries. You don’t need your own copies of the .tld files, they’re no longer required.

I was having trouble with the urls that are usually recommended, it seems some of them are outdated

I’m not sure where you got that from, but almost any JSP/servlet engine will work with the URIs I mentioned. If those URIs don’t work, then post a new question to that effect. Downloading your own tld files is almost certainly not the correct approach.