But what if you DO need access to the body contents?
You’ll probably find that most of the time the lifecycle methods from the Tag and IterationTag interfaces, as provided by TagSupport, are enough. Between the three key methods (doStartTag(), doAfterBody(), and doEndTag()), you can do just about anything.
Except...you don’t have direct access to the contents of the body. If you need access to the actual body contents, so that you can, say, use it in an expression or perhaps filter or alter it in some way, then extend BodyTagSupport instead of TagSupport, and you’ll have access to the BodyTag interface methods.
Extending BodyTagSupport gives you two more lifecycle methods from the BodyTag interface—setBodyContent() and doInitBody(). You can use these to do something with the actual CONTENTS of the body of the tag used to invoke the handler.
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