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20031002 Thursday October 02, 2003

Simple "workaround" for exporting with the displaytag using Tiles I figured out an easy "workaround" to the fact that the displaytag's export feature (to XML, CSV, and Excel) doesn't work when using Tiles. The happens because the response has already been committed by Tiles (when including previous JSPs) and the displaytag is unable to set the contentType. Here's my workaround:

In struts-config.xml, create a local forward that goes directly to the JSP: 

  <forward name="exportList" path="/WEB-INF/pages/userList.jsp"/>

Then in your Action, add a little logic to see if you should forward to the definition or to the list:

  // if exportType is a parameter, forward directly to JSP
  if (request.getParameter("exportType") != null) {
    if (log.isDebugEnabled()) {
      log.debug("export detected, forwarding directly to list jsp");
    }

    return mapping.findForward("exportList");
  } else {
    // return a forward to the user list definition
    return mapping.findForward("list");
  }

Tested with displaytag 0.8.5 on Windows XP and Tomcat 4.1.27. Enjoy!

Update: This workaround will not work with displaytag 1.0b1. There is another solution using a Filter, so we'll try to incorporate that into the 1.0 release. Posted in Java at Oct 02 2003, 09:58:41 PM MDT 1 Comment

Comments:

Have you been able to get DisplayTag working with JSTL? DT is a beautiful tag, but I'm not sure how to use it to take data from an SQL query and display with DT. I've heard some rumors about having to build a list, but I'm not sure.

Posted by Nic Werner on November 21, 2003 at 01:32 PM MST #

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