There's certainly some evidence here that Ganesh doesn't realize that the JSP runs on the server and generates HTML which is executed in the browser. That being the case, the scriptlet in the JSP is useless. There's also the possibility that Ganesh doesn't realize that the browser doesn't have direct access to the file system on the server, which ties in to the first possible misunderstanding.
However all we have is an incomplete and incoherent description of the requirements. We don't know whether these PDF files to be displayed in the browser are coming from the client machine or from the server, for a start.
Using a browser to display files from the client machine is impractical and pointless and probably not allowed because of security issues, besides which the browser has no way of identifying files on the client anyway. But that still might be the requirement if it's coming from somebody who doesn't understand the web environment.
On the other hand if the requirement is to display files which come from the server, then what's required is a file download. A JSP is completely the wrong tool to download binary files, what is required is a download
servlet.
On the other other hand, there's also the fact that Ganesh has included HTML code which is designed to upload files to the server, which you wouldn't do by accident if you were a beginner. And he mentions another FAQ, which is that IE uploads the whole file path when you do that and other browsers don't. This almost looks like he wants to upload a file path and not to upload the contents of the file, which would be a different misunderstanding. It rather looks like he is trying to upload the path to a file on the client and then generate HTML to display that file in the browser, which would be pretty useless even if it could be done, which it can't. Anyway there's plenty of scope for guessing about what the real requirements are.
So hopefully Ganesh can take this post and take it to whoever the real requirement came from. Perhaps that person could pick out whatever applies to that requirement and clarify things.
