Head First Servlets and JSP, 2nd Edition

What if the tag body uses an expression?

Imagine you have a tag with a body that uses an EL expression for an attribute. Now imagine that the attribute doesn’t exist at the time you invoke the tag! In other words, the tag body depends on the tag handler to set the attribute. The example doesn’t do anything very useful, but it’s here to show you how it works in preparation for a bigger example.

Sharpen your pencil

Imagine you have a tag that looks like this:

<table>
<myTags:simple4>
  <tr><td>${movie}</td></tr>
</myTags:simple4>
</table>

Imagine that the tag handler has access to an array of String movie names, and you want to print one row for each movie name in the array. In the browser, you’ll see something like:

Write the tag handler doTag() method to support that goal.