Installation Guide

Manual installation

This package comes with pre-built binaries. Those distribution files are:

file description
displaytag-1.1.jar main taglib jar
displaytag-export-poi-1.1.jar optional excel export module

To quickly view the documentation and examples showing the features and functionality of the display taglib, just deploy the sample web application to your application server (the details of how differ from server to server) or servlet container.

If you would like to make use of the display taglib in your own application, do the following:

  1. Drop the displaytag-version.jar file in your application WEB-INF/lib directory

  2. Make sure that following libraries are in your WEB-INF/lib directory (or made available via the classpath to your application server). Refer to the dependencies document for the correct version of these libraries. You can download a copy of everything from jakarta or you can grab them from the example webapp in the bin distribution. The following is the list of dependencies:

    • commons-logging
    • commons-lang
    • commons-collections
    • commons-beanutils
    • log4j
    • itext (optional, for pdf/rtf export)

    You may want to include also the displaytag-export-poi jar, which adds an excel binary export using jakarta POI. The poi jar is required by displaytag-export-poi

  3. Optional. Depending on your architecture, you may need to configure a filter to make export work. See the export filter page for the details about how to do it and when you could need it.

DONE : Define the tag extension in each JSP page that uses the display taglib. The uri directives must match the URI defined in one of the tlds in the jar file. With JSP 1.2 containers, the jar file is automatically scanned and you don't need to define an entry in your web.xml file. The prefix identifies the tags in the tag library within the JSP page.

      <%@ taglib uri="http://displaytag.sf.net" prefix="display" %>

The declaration, if you are using a JSP XML syntax, looks like:

      <jsp:root version="1.2" xmlns:jsp="http://java.sun.com/JSP/Page"
         xmlns:display="urn:jsptld:http://displaytag.sf.net">

For more help with general taglib use, please see: http://jakarta.apache.org/taglibs/tutorial.html

Using maven

If you use maven 2 for your projects all you need to do is including a reference to displaytag in the dependencies section of your POM:

        <dependency>
          <groupId>org.displaytag</groupId>
          <artifactId>displaytag</artifactId>
          <version>1.1.1</version>
        </dependency>

The only additional configuration required in your web.xml is the export filter entry.

If you want to also use the optional excel export module you will need to include:

        <dependency>
          <groupId>org.displaytag</groupId>
          <artifactId>displaytag-export-poi</artifactId>
          <version>1.1.1</version>
        </dependency>

When using maven 1 you will also need to add displaytag dependencies to your POM. An easy way to do this is cut and paste from the example web application