Introduction

In this article we will discuss one of the action tags, “forward action”, used in JSP with a suitable example.

Forward action tag

The forward action tag forwards requests to another resource and it may be a JSP page, an HTML page or another type of resource. Tags are used to do a specific task. Actually action tags control the flow among the pages.
There are the following two types of forwarding action tags:
forward action tag
Syntax of forward action tag (without parameter):
<jsp:forward page="relative url | <%=expression%>"/>
Example
In this example, we are just forwarding the request to the show.jsp page and retrieving the information related to the page.
Index.jsp
  1. <html>
  2. <head>
  3. <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
  4. <title>JSP forward action tag</title>
  5. </head>
  6. <body>
  7. <h1>This is index page</h1>
  8. <jsp:forward page="show.jsp"/>
  9. </body>
  10. </html>
Show.jsp
  1. <html>
  2. <head>
  3. <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
  4. <title>JSP forward action tag</title>
  5. </head>
  6. <body>
  7. <h1>Hello World!</h1>
  8. <p>This is what you suppose to see</p>
  9. <% out.print("Today's date & time:"+java.util.Calendar.getInstance().getTime());%>
  10. </body>
  11. </html>
Output
Output
Syntax of forward action tag (with parameter)
  1. <jsp:forward page="relative url | <%=expression%>">
  2. <jsp:param name="parametername" value="parametervalue | <%=expression%>"/>
  3. </jsp:forward>
Example
In this example, we are forwarding the request to the show.jsp page with parameters and the show.jsp page prints the parameter values.
Index.jsp
  1. <html>
  2. <head>
  3. <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
  4. <title>JSP forward action tag</title>
  5. </head>
  6. <body>
  7. <h1>This is index page</h1>
  8. <jsp:forward page="show.jsp">
  9. <jsp:param name="name" value="Gopi Chand"/>
  10. <jsp:param name="site" value="c-sharpcorner.com"/>
  11. <jsp:param name="Date&Time" value="c-sharpcorner.com"/>
  12. </jsp:forward>
  13. </body>
  14. </html>
Show.jsp
  1. <html>
  2. <head>
  3. <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
  4. <title>JSP forward action tag</title>
  5. </head>
  6. <body>
  7. <h1>Hello World!</h1>
  8. <p>Now see the changes</p>
  9. My name:<%=request.getParameter("name")%><br>
  10. Source page:<%=request.getParameter("site")%><br>
  11. <% out.print("Today's date & time:"+java.util.Calendar.getInstance().getTime());%>
  12. Date & Time:<%=request.getParameter("Date&Time")%>
  13. </body>
  14. </html>
Output
prints the parameter values