Using constants in JSP pages

[David Kennedy]

Most of our pages have a header/navbar which performs some highlighting 
of the current page's category etc. This means all pages must define 
beans to say things like, "My category is FOO, my sub-category is BAR"

I would like to get the compiler to spot typos:
(1) To make sure FOO matches one of the defined categories in the navbar.
(2) To make sure the category variable itself is correct.
I can achieve (1) by defining a simple constants class and using the 
'unstandard' taglib:
	<un: var="foo" type="com.foo.Constants" field="FOO"/>

How can I achieve (2)? A little paranoid I know, but I've already 
defined "fo" by mistake in a couple of places(*), and there doesn't seem 
to be any advantage to using a constant if it is in turn defined by 
another hand-typed variable!

All I can think of is
<un: var="<%=com.foo.Constants.FOO_NAME%>" type="..." field="...">
but if I'm going to use <%= %> I might as well just write
        <%= com.foo.Constants.FOO %>
rather than use bind at all!
(*) Where obviously the real var names are longer and easier to typo 
than foo.
--
David Kennedy
Swan Labs
http://www.swanlabs.com

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