How to iterate list on JSP in Spring MVC

By Atul Rai | Last Updated: August 30, 2018 Previous Next

To iterate the ArrayList or any list on JSP in Spring MVC framework, you can use the JSTL (JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library) library. It provides many features like handling core, database operation, function, and i18n support.

To use the JSTL core tags in JSP pages by adding the following taglib directive:

<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" prefix="c" %>

And to iterate list values, JSTL core have <c:forEach/> tag. It will display the list values one by one.

<c:forEach var="emp" items="${empList}">
    ...
</c:forEach>

Dependency Required

You need to add Spring MVC and JSTL dependency in your project.

pom.xml

<dependencies>
	<dependency>
		<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
		<artifactId>spring-webmvc</artifactId>
		<version>5.0.2.RELEASE</version>
	</dependency>
	<dependency>
		<groupId>jstl</groupId>
		<artifactId>jstl</artifactId>
		<version>1.2</version>
	</dependency>
</dependencies>

Controller

Create a controller ListController class that returns the list to the view.

ListController.java

package org.websparrow.controller;

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;

import org.springframework.stereotype.Controller;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMethod;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.ModelAndView;

@Controller
public class ListController {

	@RequestMapping(value = "/list", method = RequestMethod.GET)
	public ModelAndView listAction() {

		List<String> empList = new ArrayList<>();
		empList.add("Atul");
		empList.add("Abhinav");
		empList.add("Prince");
		empList.add("Gaurav");

		ModelAndView mv = new ModelAndView();

		mv.setViewName("index");
		mv.addObject("empList", empList);

		return mv;

	}
}

Views

Create a JSP page to iterate the list.

index.jsp

<%@ page isELIgnored="false" %>
<%@taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core"%>

<html>
<body>

	<h2>How to iterate list on JSP in Spring MVC</h2>

	<p><b>Simple List:</b><p>
	
	${empList}
	
	<p><b>Iterated List:</b><p>

	<ol>
		<c:forEach var="emp" items="${empList}">
		
			<li>${emp}</li>
			
		</c:forEach>
	</ol>

</body>
</html>

Output

Run the application and hit the following URL into your browser…

localhost:8080/spring-mvc-iterate-list/list

References

Download Source Code: how-to-iterate-list-on-jsp-in-spring-mvc.zip

About the Author

Atul Rai

I love sharing my experiments and ideas with everyone by writing articles on the latest technological trends. Read all published posts by Atul Rai.