JEE 5 odd question

From:
Msj121 <msj121@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Thu, 4 Sep 2008 22:09:21 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID:
<0266274e-76dc-429e-8199-a4929a1488a8@x41g2000hsb.googlegroups.com>
I have a table that contains links and text for a navigation menu (so
that it is dynamic).

At the moment I decided that this servlet should be pretty much called
by all or many other servlets that will help render the visuals of the
page. I am not sure how to properly according to good practice do this
(extending it seems ugly). Also, once I get the navigation link
servlet to add all the tags (for the JSP) I don't know how to forward
the request to the correct page (ie: I can hard code it, but that
would limit the servlet to one page, and this servlet generates
content for many pages).

It would seem a nice solution would be to somehow call this servlet
from the JSP (or previous to the JSP) and then somehow have a
parameter to know what servlet to forward to next going down the
chain.

I think that extending might work just fine... but it doesn't seem
like the best solution. I am definitely new to JEE (though I have
worked on the back end of Java Servers for a while). The Links are
stored using EJB3 and gathered that way on the servlet.

Perhaps I should be using something else entirely? There really must
be an easy way to mine the data, but it just isn't appearing to me. I
really appreciate any help.

The code below is where I am at right now, but I got stuck when
thinking ahead:
 @PersistenceUnit
    EntityManagerFactory emf;
    /**
    * Processes requests for both HTTP <code>GET</code> and
<code>POST</code> methods.
    * @param request servlet request
    * @param response servlet response
    */
    protected void processRequest(HttpServletRequest request,
HttpServletResponse response)
    throws ServletException, IOException {
        assert emf != null;
        EntityManager em = null;
        try {
            em = emf.createEntityManager();
            List links = em.createQuery("select x from
NavigationBarLink x").getResultList();
            request.setAttribute("links", links);

        } catch(Exception e){
            throw new ServletException(e);
        } finally {
            if(em!=null)
                em.close();
            em = null;
        }
    }

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