Accessing Oracle ATG variables with Javascript

Question

I am trying to pass the contents of a bean to javascript so that I can parse it and create a JSON object... (Yes I am still on ATG 9.1). However I am having trouble getting from serverside to client side.... I am new with this stuff and would appreciate any explanation as documentation on this is scarce and not helpful.

<dsp:tomap var="cartMap" bean="MyShoppingCartModifier.order" recursive="true"/>
<script>
    var myCartMap = "${cartMap}";
    //Logic (easy)
</script>

Doing this generates an "Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token ILLEGAL" on my browser (Chrome)

Any wisdom will greatly help me in my quest in learning this stuff.

Answer 1

The problem is your usage of the tomap tag. You can't just pass in an entire tomap'd object because the tomap tag isn't going to create a nice, parsable json object.

You should either:

1) Format the json yourself right within your tags. Choose only the values that you want from the order.

<script>
   var myCart = {
      total : '<dsp:valueof bean="MyShoppingCartModifier.order.priceInfo.total">'
      ...
   }

   // Then use myCart for something here
</script>

or 2) There's a little known JSP to JSON library found here, http://json-taglib.sourceforge.net, that is very useful. To use that, you'd create a separate page, something like orderJSON.jspf, that is used to generate a pure json object from your order. Then in the page that you require this js, you can do:

<script>
   var myCart = <%@ include file="/path/to/orderJSON.jspf" %>
   // Then use myCart for something here.
</script>