Creating Custom Tag In JSP

A Custom Tag is a user-defined JSP language element. When a JSP page containing a Custom Tag is translated into a servlet, the tag is converted to operations on an object called a tag handler. The web container then invokes those operations when the JSP page's servlet is executed.

JSP tag extensions let you create new tags that you can insert directly into a JavaServer Page just as you would the built-in tags. Custom Tags are distributed in a tag library, that defines a set of related Custom Tags and contains the objects that implement the tags. The object that implements a Custom Tag is called a tag handler.

Let's do a demo: Create a "<today>" tag using the following:

1. To create a custom JSP tag, you must first create a Java class that acts as a tag handler. So let us create a MyTagHandler.java class file inside the user package and write the following code in that class:
   
   
   
   The code above is simple, where the "doTag()" method just prints the current day and time.
    
2. Right-click on "WEB-INF" then click on "Others" then under "web catagory" click on "Tag Library Descriptor" as in the following:
   
   
    
3. Click on "Next", then for the TLD Name provide "MyTag" as in the following:
   
   
    
4. Open the MyTag.tld file and enter the following code to create the Custom Tag:
   
   
    
5. Now it's time to use the above defined Custom Tag "Hello" in our JSP program as follows. Open Index.jsp and provide a reference to the tag library by writing the following code:
   
   <%@taglib uri="WEB-INF/tlds/Mytags.tld" prefix="m" %>
   
   
   
   The preceding image shows the complete code of index.jsp.
    
6. Run your index.jsp page. If everything goes fine then you will get the following output.