Struts - Taglib directive in a JSP page for .tld provided by Struts

Question

I am developing a Struts based application. I am new to Struts. I want to use html tags , specified in a taglib directory provided by Struts<

Answer 1

Even if this question has an (to me, incomprehensibly) accepted answer, I feel obliged to have a go at it myself. The real answer is contained in BalusC's comment and suggesting stray .tld files laying around in WEB-INF is really bad advice. My intention is expand on this using the exact version of Struts2 the OP was asking about (v2.1.8), which I downloaded from Apache's historical archive.

1. I don't know in which .jar file the struts-html.tld file is located.

There is no struts-html.tld in Struts2 - Instead there are the following:

• struts-tags.tld, which resides in the META-INF directory of struts2-core-2.1.8.jar and contains all standard Struts tags, like the ones you'd expect to find in struts-html.tld in Struts1.
• tiles-jsp.tld, which resides in the META-INF directory of tiles-jsp-2.0.6.jar and corresponds to what was struts-tiles.tld in Struts1.
• some more TLDs, e.g. for SiteMesh which are not directly related to the question.

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2. I want to use html tags, specified in a taglib directory provided by Struts, in a JSP page. But don't know how to use it. I know how to use taglib directive but I came to know from sources that the .tld file has been embedded in a .jar file after version 1.2.8.

That is correct. The way it generally works is the following:

• When the servlet container starts up, it looks through the WEB-INF/lib directory and loads any .jar files it finds there - This is where you need to place the Struts2 library.
• Inside these .jar files, any TLDs are expected to reside in the META-INF directory. Obviously and as mentioned above, this already is the case for struts2-core-2.1.8.jar, so there's nothing that needs to be done.
• When the servlet container loads the TLD, it looks for the element inside the root element and stores a mapping between that TLD and its URI. Correspondingly, this URI is used in your .jsp files to reference the TLD.

In the case of struts2-core-2.1.8.jar, the URI is /struts-tags and thus you need to reference it in a .jsp file like this (of course you can change the prefix attribute to your liking)...

<%@ taglib uri="/struts-tags" prefix="s" %>

...and subsequently put it to use, like e.g. this:

    (...)