Question

Instead of hardcoding the years in my dropdownlist, I’m going to pass over a year as the first option value and then want the following 2 values to be the previous year and so on. Something like this:

<select name="workloadYear">
    <option value="2008" <c:if test="${form.workloadYear == 2008}">selected="selected"</c:if>>2008</option>
    <option value="2007" <c:if test="${form.workloadYear == 2007}">selected="selected"</c:if>>2007</option>
    <option value="2006" <c:if test="${form.workloadYear == 2006}">selected="selected"</c:if>>2006</option>
</select>

How can I do this without hardcoding the years?

Answer 1

You can get the current year in EL as follows:

<jsp:useBean id="now" class="java.util.Date" />
<fmt:formatDate var="year" value="${now}" pattern="yyyy" />

(it’s now available as ${year})

You can do a loop in JSP using <c:forEach>:

<select name="workloadYear">
    <c:forEach begin="0" end="2" varStatus="loop">
        <c:set var="currentYear" value="${year - loop.index}" />
        <option value="${currentYear}" ${form.workloadYear == currentYear ? 'selected="selected"' : ''}>${currentYear}</option>
    </c:forEach>
</select>

This will display the current year and the 2 previous years as options.