Forward Action Tag in JSP

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:

Without parameter
With parameter

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

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<title>JSP forward action tag</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is index page</h1>
<jsp:forward page="show.jsp"/>
</body>
</html>

Show.jsp

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<title>JSP forward action tag</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello World!</h1>
<p>This is what you suppose to see</p>
<% out.print("Today's date & time:"+java.util.Calendar.getInstance().getTime());%>
</body>
</html>

Output

Syntax of forward action tag (with parameter)

<jsp:forward page="relative url | <%=expression%>">
<jsp:param name="parametername" value="parametervalue | <%=expression%>"/>
</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

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<title>JSP forward action tag</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is index page</h1>
<jsp:forward page="show.jsp">
<jsp:param name="name" value="Gopi Chand"/>
<jsp:param name="site" value="c-sharpcorner.com"/>
<jsp:param name="Date&Time" value="c-sharpcorner.com"/>
</jsp:forward>
</body>
</html>

Show.jsp

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<title>JSP forward action tag</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello World!</h1>
<p>Now see the changes</p>
My name:<%=request.getParameter("name")%><br>
Source page:<%=request.getParameter("site")%><br>
<% out.print("Today's date & time:"+java.util.Calendar.getInstance().getTime());%>
Date & Time:<%=request.getParameter("Date&Time")%>
</body>
</html>

Output