how to show jsp in response to an ajax call to a servlet

Question

i am sending search parameters to a search servlet using ajax and that servlet is searching the database. now i am dispatching the request to SearchResults.jsp where i am showing the results.

String nextJSP = "/s/SearchResults.jsp";
RequestDispatcher dispatcher = getServletContext().getRequestDispatcher(nextJSP);
dispatcher.forward(request, response);

The problem is that i am getting full jsp in response to the ajax call , but i want the SearchResults.jsp page to be opened with the results after the ajax call.

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:15

1

There is a similiar question: best practice to render JSON data in JSPs? This is sample for json to return json data: http://code.google.com/p/json-simple/wiki/JSPAndAJAXExamples Also there is some jsp tab lib like:http://json-taglib.sourceforge.net/

In short, you can control what to output in the jsp by juding the request accept type.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:15

Community

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1

answered Mar 17 '11 at 09:10

Fourj

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score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

Don't use JSP for this. It's good for HTML stuff only. Just let the servlet return JSON or XML and process it in JS side. Here's a kickoff example assuming that you want to search for products and that the Product class has properties name, description and price which you'd like to show in a table.

products.jsp

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
    <head>
        <title>SO question 5336889</title>
        <script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.min.js"></script>
        <script>
            $(document).ready(function() {
                $('#search').submit(function() {
                    $.get(this.action, $(this).serialize(), function(products) {
                        var $table = $('<table>').appendTo($('#results'));
                        $.each(products, function(index, product) {
                            var $tr = $('<tr>').appendTo($table);
                            $('<td>').text(product.name).appendTo($tr);
                            $('<td>').text(product.description).appendTo($tr);
                            $('<td>').text(product.price).appendTo($tr);
                        });
                    });
                });
            });
        </script>
    </head>
    <body>
        <form id="search" action="products">
            Search products:
            <input name="query" />
            <input type="submit" />
        </form>
        <div id="results"></div>
    </body>
</html>

In combination with a servlet which listens on an URL pattern of /products:

@Override
protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException {
    List<Product> products = productDAO.find(request.getParameter("query"));
    response.setContentType("application/json");
    response.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");
    response.getWriter().write(new Gson().toJson(products));
}

(where Gson is Google Gson).

how to show jsp in response to an ajax call to a servlet

2 Answers2

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