I'm using navbar in my java mvc app. I put navbar in my own tags library under WEB-INF/tags so that I don't have to replicate code in each jsp view. However, I can't determine how I change the corresponding navbar tab to make use of

<lib class="nav-item" active>

As a result, the Navbar never changes scope using that visual indicator. I'm assuming that this is what puts the faded box behind the tab name to show that it is the current tab in use. Is there something that I can add to my Get/Post sections of my controller, or to the corresponding jsp page that will make this change to the correct <li> item?

I added an 'id' attribute to each <li> element and inserted this piece of javascript into one of the pages but it didn't have any effect.

<script>
var x = document.getElementById("li2");
if (x.className === "") {
    x.element.className = "active";
}
</script>