applicationContext object in JSP

Question

How to configure in my spring project to retrieve the applicationContext object in jsp using JSTL.

Answer 1

<%@page import="org.springframework.web.context.WebApplicationContext"%>
<%@page import="org.springframework.web.context.support.WebApplicationContextUtils"%>
<%
  WebApplicationContext context = WebApplicationContextUtils
        .getWebApplicationContext(application);
%>

application is the JSP defined ServletContext.

If you want to retrieve a bean and use JSTL, you can then do something like:

<%pageContext.setAttribute("bean", context.getBean("myBean"));%>
<c:out value="${bean.property}"/>

But, just because you can, doesn't mean you should. If you are doing anything more than displaying a bean's property you probably want to put this in a Servlet or some other controller.

Also, you do not want to be using the ApplicationContext as a way to pass beans between your controllers and views.

Answer 2

Spring root web application context is available in servlet context attribute named: org.springframework.web.context.WebApplicationContext.ROOT:

${applicationScope['org.springframework.web.context.WebApplicationContext.ROOT']}

Haven't tried it, but should be accessible via JSTL. But what you want to achieve? Is JSP really a good place to fetch beans manually and perform some business operations? Shouldn't you do all the work in servlet/controller and let JSP do only the view, as it was intended?

Answer 3

EDIT: I was worng, it doesn't work. Anyway, you would be able to access all beans by name, with no need of ApplicationContext, depending on what you need to do.

.

If you set property exposeContextBeansAsAttributes of InternalResourceViewResolver to true, you would be able to access from JSP using EL: ${applicationContext}. Depending of what you're trying to do, this can be more or less suitable.

EDIT: Your view resolver for JSP must be something similar to:

<bean id="viewResolver" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver">
    <property name="viewClass" value="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.JstlView" />
    <property name="prefix" value="/WEB-INF/views/" />
    <property name="suffix" value=".jsp" />
    <property name="exposeContextBeansAsAttributes" value="true" />
</bean>

The best thing is that you can get the bean you want by its name. So, probably, you won't need ApplicationContext there.

Answer 4

For Spring 4 it works well:

<%
ApplicationContext context = RequestContextUtils.findWebApplicationContext(request);
%>