Passing an object into a tag

Question

Hello
I have a tag file called foo.tag
<%@tag description="some tag" pageEncoding="UTF-8"%>
<%@tag import="java.util.*"%>
<%@attribute name="list" type="java.util.List" required="true"%>
<h4>I am a list</h4>
<p>Class: <%=list.getClass()%></p>And in my index.jsp I do:
<%@ taglib prefix="jc" tagdir="/WEB-INF/tags" %>
<%
      List bar = new ArrayList();
      bar.add("test");
%>
<jc:foo list="<%=bar%>"/>..in order to pass the reference of bar in my tag. That works, but I know that it's "bad" practice to have <%= %> inside your JSPs. How could I improve the parameter passing? If I say <jc:foo list="bar"/> then I only get a "bar" String on the tag file.
thanks

Answer 1

Thanks for your reply.
But is there a better way of doing this? Yeah, there is a slightly better way if you are using JSP 2.0 (properly configured). Then you can do:
<% List bar = new ArrayList();
   bar.add("foo");
   request.setAttribute("bar", bar);
%>
<jc:foo list="${bar}"/>
    public void setList(List theList) { ... }
Can't I just
feed the object into the tag as an object?Not directly. The List you create in the scriptlet has a limited scope, just inside the _jspService method.  This scope isn't really available to things like tags and EL, so you have to put it in a scope where it can be found - something like the request, or page scopes.