How to retrieve bean from Struts Tiles and use in a JSP

Question

We are using Struts Tiles 1.x in a legacy web application. In a.jsp, we do:

<tiles:put name="bean" beanName="change"></tiles:put>

Later, b.jsp references a.jsp. In b.jsp, we currently have a scriptlet, in which we do:

<% DomainObject domObject = (DomainObject) TilesHelper.getAttribute("bean", pageContext); %>

This is what getAttribute(String,PageContext) looks like:

public class TilesHelper {
    public static Object getAttribute(String name, PageContext pageContext) throws JspException {
        ComponentContext compContext = (ComponentContext) pageContext.getAttribute(
                ComponentConstants.COMPONENT_CONTEXT, PageContext.REQUEST_SCOPE);

        if (compContext == null) {
            throw new JspException("Error - tag.getAttribute : component context is not defined. Check tag syntax");
        }

        return compContext.getAttribute(name);
    }

This works, but I don't like scriptlets. Scriptlets are ugly. I don't want any scriptlets in this JSP. I want to use a tag to access the object passed in request scope using. I've tried

<bean:define id="domObject" name="bean" scope="request"/>

This fails with error can't find bean bean in scope request.

How do I access the object passed in the <tiles:put> call in a tag like <bean:define> or <jsp:useBean>?

Thanks

Answer 1

In case this helps anyone later: after much eye-straining forum browsing and rereads of the documentation, I was able to decipher that the correct tag to use is

<tiles:useAttribute id="beanId" name="beanNameHere" classname="theBeanClass" scope="request"/>.

This declares a Java variable in scope request which can then be accessed like any other bean, in my case using EL, for example:

<c:if test="${beanId.class.simpleName == 'someInterestingClass'}">
    <c:out value="${beanId.someInterestingProperty}"/> 
</c:if>