I want to loop through an ArrayList of "Festivals" and get their information with get methods, printing out all its values. For some reason when I use this code, it will always choose the "0"th value and not increment the loop.
If I hard code the values as "get(1)" it will get the correct values so my issue is clearly with the syntax.
<h1>All Festival Information</h1>
<jsp:useBean id="allFestivals" type="java.util.ArrayList" scope="session" />
<table border="1">
<tr>
<td>Festival Name:</td>
<td>Location:</td>
<td>Start Date:</td>
<td>End Date:</td>
<td>URL:</td>
</tr>
<% for(int i = 0; i < allFestivals.size(); i+=1) { %>
<tr>
<td>${allFestivals.get(i).getFestivalName()}</td>
<td>${allFestivals.get(i).getLocation()}</td>
<td>${allFestivals.get(i).getStartDate()}</td>
<td>${allFestivals.get(i).getEndDate()}</td>
<td>${allFestivals.get(i).getURL()}</td>
</tr>
<% } %>
</table>
You concrete problem is caused because you're mixing discouraged and old school scriptlets <% %> with its successor EL ${}. They do not share the same variable scope. The allFestivals is not available in scriptlet scope and the i is not available in EL scope.
You should install JSTL (<-- click the link for instructions) and declare it in top of JSP as follows:
<%@taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core"%>
and then iterate over the list as follows:
<c:forEach items="${allFestivals}" var="festival">
<tr>
<td>${festival.festivalName}</td>
<td>${festival.location}</td>
<td>${festival.startDate}</td>
<td>${festival.endDate}</td>
<td>${festival.URL}</td>
</tr>
</c:forEach>
(beware of possible XSS attack holes, use <c:out> accordingly)
Don't forget to remove the <jsp:useBean> as it has no utter value here when you're using a servlet as model-and-view controller. It would only lead to confusion. See also our servlets wiki page. Further you would do yourself a favour to disable scriptlets by the following entry in web.xml so that you won't accidently use them:
<jsp-config>
<jsp-property-group>
<url-pattern>*.jsp</url-pattern>
<scripting-invalid>true</scripting-invalid>
</jsp-property-group>
</jsp-config>
Do this
<% for(int i = 0; i < allFestivals.size(); i+=1) { %>
<tr>
<td><%=allFestivals.get(i).getFestivalName()%></td>
</tr>
<% } %>
Better way is to use c:foreach see link jstl for each
Source: Stackoverflow.com