How to pass values from JSP to tiles attribute?

spring jsp tiles
SD1234 picture SD1234 · Jan 18, 2012 · Viewed 36.4k times · Source

I am converting an existing Tiles 1 webapp to Tiles 2 architecture. I am having trouble passing values from JSP page to tiles attributes.

Here is my tiles definition file (tiles-definition.xml)

<tiles-definitions>

    <definition name="cda.layout" template="/jsp/layouts/layout.jsp">
        <put-attribute name="pageTitle" value="StoryTitle" type="string"/>
        <put-attribute name="pageHeader" value="StoryHeader" type="string"/>
        <put-attribute name="resources" value="" type="string"/>
    </definition>

</tiles-definitions>

The layout.jsp looks like:

<html>
    <head>
    <title><tiles:insertAttribute name="pageTitle" flush="true"/></title> 
    </head>

    <body>
    ...
    ...

    <div class="content">
    <h1><tiles:insertAttribute name="pageHeader" flush="true"/></h1>
    </div>

    ...
    ...
    </body>
</html>

I have a story page which uses the layout and need to pass values to template attributes.

    <%
    // create a business object and populate
    String mytitle= story.getTitle();
    String myheader = story.getHeader();
    %>

<tiles:insertTemplate template="../layouts/layout.jsp"  flush="false" >
    <tiles:putAttribute name="pageTitle" value="${mytitle}"/>
    <tiles:putAttribute name="pageHeader"value="${myheader}"/>
</tiles:insertTemplate>

In the story.jsp, I can System.out.print() the values for mytitle, myheader and they are showing correct. But, these values are NOT passed on to the tile attributes.

Any idea how to fix this?

Answer

JB Nizet picture JB Nizet · Jan 18, 2012

${mytitle} is a JSP EL expression which means: find an attribute in page scope, or request scope, or session scope, or application scope, named "mytitle".

By defining a scriptlet variable, you haven't defined an attribute in any of these scopes. It would work if you had

pageContext.setAttribute("mytitle", mytitle);

But using scriptlets in JSPs is bad practice. I don't know where your story bean comes from, but it's probably a request attribute. If so, you can define a new page-scope attribute this way, using the JSTL:

<c:set var="mytitle" value="${story.title}"/>

This is unnecessary though, since you could use this expression directly in the tiles tag:

<tiles:putAttribute name="pageTitle" value="${story.title}"/>

Read more about the JSP EL in this tutorial.

Related questions

Redirect from one controller method to another controller method

I am using Spring 3 and Tiles 2 in my application and have a bit of trouble with redirecting. Preferably, I would like to be able to just call or redirect from a Controller1 method to Controller2 method, but so far have …

Read More
Accessing Spring beans from a Tiles view (JSP)

In Spring MVC I can access my beans in JSP using JstlView's exposedContextBeanNames (or exposeContextBeansAsAttributes). For example, then, in my JSP I can write (${properties.myProperty). But when the same JSP is a part of a tiles view, these properties …

Read More
How do I have common error page templates with tiles in a Spring/MVC 3.0 app?

I have a Spring MVC/3.0 app using tiles as it's view, this is working fine however I can't figure out how to get the error pages to also use tiles. I have in my web.xml <error-page> <…

Read More