Dinesh on Java

Categories: JSTL

JSTL Choose When Otherwise Tag

These tags are used as a conditional statement in JSP. The <c:choose> works like a Java switch statement in that it lets you choose between a number of alternatives. Where the switch statement has case statements, the <c:choose> tag has <c:when> tags. A a switch statement has default clause to specify a default action and similar way <c:choose> has <c:otherwise> as default clause.

Attribute:
The <c:choose> tag does not have any attribute.
The <c:when> tag has one attributes which is listed below.
The <c:otherwise> tag does not have any attribute.
The <c:when> tag has following attributes:

<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" prefix="c" %>
<html>
<head>
<title><c:choose> Tag Example</title>
</head>
<body>
<c:set var="salary" scope="session" value="${2000*2}"/>
<p>Your salary is : <c:out value="${salary}"/></p>
<c:choose>
    <c:when test="${salary <= 0}">
       Salary is very low to survive.
    </c:when>
    <c:when test="${salary > 100000}">
        Salary is very good.
    </c:when>
    <c:otherwise>
        No comment sir...
    </c:otherwise>
</c:choose>
</body>
</html>

As you can see above, <c:choose>-<c:when>-<c:otherwise> tags JSP are similar to if-elesif-else blocks in JAVA. When you have multiple conditions and each of them produces different output, you can use <c:choose>-<c:when>-<c:otherwise>.

Make sure that there is no condition evaluation in <c:choose> block. This is enclosing tag for <c:when> and <c:otherwise> blocks.

<c:when> tag has condition evaluation capability and you can have multiple <c:when> blocks within single <c:choose> block. Each condition can be evaluated using test attribute of this statement.

<c:otherwise> block do not have any condition evaluation capability. It represents all conditions which are not covered by <c:when> statements. <c:otherwise> statement must be present in <c:choose> block.

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Dinesh Rajput

Dinesh Rajput is the chief editor of a website Dineshonjava, a technical blog dedicated to the Spring and Java technologies. It has a series of articles related to Java technologies. Dinesh has been a Spring enthusiast since 2008 and is a Pivotal Certified Spring Professional, an author of a book Spring 5 Design Pattern, and a blogger. He has more than 10 years of experience with different aspects of Spring and Java design and development. His core expertise lies in the latest version of Spring Framework, Spring Boot, Spring Security, creating REST APIs, Microservice Architecture, Reactive Pattern, Spring AOP, Design Patterns, Struts, Hibernate, Web Services, Spring Batch, Cassandra, MongoDB, and Web Application Design and Architecture. He is currently working as a technology manager at a leading product and web development company. He worked as a developer and tech lead at the Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd and was the first developer in his previous company, Paytm. Dinesh is passionate about the latest Java technologies and loves to write technical blogs related to it. He is a very active member of the Java and Spring community on different forums. When it comes to the Spring Framework and Java, Dinesh tops the list!