JSP: What is page directive?

A page directive is to inform the JSP engine about the headers or facilities that page should get from the environment.

• Typically, the page directive is found at the top of almost all of our JSP pages.

• There can be any number of page directives within a JSP page (although the attribute – value pair must be unique).

• The syntax of the include directive is: <%@ page attribute="value">

• Example :<%@ include file="header.jsp" %>

There are thirteen attributes defined for a page directive of which the important attributes are as follows:

• import: It specifies the packages that are to be imported.

• session: It specifies whether a session data is available to the JSP page.

• contentType: It allows a user to set the content-type for a page.

• isELIgnored: It specifies whether the EL expressions are ignored when a JSP is translated to a servlet.