Chris, Depending on how dynamic you want the text to be there are several methods you can use. For example. if a specific include page has a button with the text "hello" and that changes only when business requirements dictate it. You can actually just put it into your web.xml file as an init parameter. You see this alot with webaddresses. For example a JSP page that is included as a footer file may have a "Questions and Comments contact the webmaster" where the webmaster is actually a link that says <.mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (the . was put to prevent this from showing in HTML) That web address is usually placed as a web.xml init param called webmaster (or whatever). But if the text must change dynamically depending on who is accessing the page. It may be better to have it as a database value stored and keyed by the customers id. Another approach is just do it the way that you are now. But that may cause a problem as the url has a length limitation and depending on how many fields you are setting this may cause some problems. Security is of course an issue with that method as well. Any user can tell that you are setting up fields through the URL and can easily just pass a new URL to display what he/she wants to display. Of course there are more solutions as well but I think these 2 are the main solutions if you are not hardcoding values. -Tim
-----Original Message----- From: Chris Tucker [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, November 09, 2001 2:14 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Passing parameters to includes Hi all, I was wondering how other people approach the problem of passing parameters to include files (or even if this is really something that it's a good idea to do...). For example, say I want to specify some button text for an included file, I may want pass a parameter called "buttontext" with the value "Hello". The way I've been approaching this so far is to encode the parameters as a query string on the include URL, e.g. <jsp:include page="test.jsp?buttontext=Hello" /> but this doesn't really scale up to anything more than simple textual arguments. I could add stuff to the session or context, allowing me to use more complex objects, but I don't want to be creating a load of interdependencies as far as attribute naming etc. is concerned between an include file and the file including it. Ideally, I'd like to just be able to parameterise the include as one would a method. Any suggestions? Chris Tucker =========================================================================== To unsubscribe: mailto [EMAIL PROTECTED] with body: "signoff JSP-INTEREST". For digest: mailto [EMAIL PROTECTED] with body: "set JSP-INTEREST DIGEST". Some relevant FAQs on JSP/Servlets can be found at: http://archives.java.sun.com/jsp-interest.html http://java.sun.com/products/jsp/faq.html http://www.esperanto.org.nz/jsp/jspfaq.jsp http://www.jguru.com/faq/index.jsp http://www.jspinsider.com =========================================================================== To unsubscribe: mailto [EMAIL PROTECTED] with body: "signoff JSP-INTEREST". For digest: mailto [EMAIL PROTECTED] with body: "set JSP-INTEREST DIGEST". Some relevant FAQs on JSP/Servlets can be found at: http://archives.java.sun.com/jsp-interest.html http://java.sun.com/products/jsp/faq.html http://www.esperanto.org.nz/jsp/jspfaq.jsp http://www.jguru.com/faq/index.jsp http://www.jspinsider.com