Passing beans across JSR Portlet Requests

Question

I'm new to portlet development and having trouble getting my head around the following...
All I wan't to do is display a simple form, process the data and display some results.
I would expect to do this through a combination of processAction method and a doView method, however it seems incredibly difficult to get the data created in processAction method into my JSP.
If I was writing a servlet I'd simply create a bean and store it as an attribute in the request scope, but this doesn't seem posible within portlets.
The sun examples use setRenderParameter(), but this only takes strings.
I'd could add the bean to the PortletScope but would rather not as
1. The bean will hang around for the lifetime of the portlet rather than the lifetime of the request
2. The Portlet Specification stes that "Attributes stored in the PORTLET_SCOPE are not protected from other web components of the portlet application.
Surely it can't be this hard to create a bean in the processAction method and access it from the JSP. Please tell me I'm missing something!

Answer 1

I have the same problem with WebLogic Portal, so I
think there's a problem of clarification with the spec, and I
hope this will be clarified once theres a new version of
the portlet API.
If attributes set in ActionRequest cannot be seen in
the render() methods, I simply see no point in defining
setAttribute() and getAttribute() methods on the base
PortletRequest interface ( from which both
RenderRequest and ActionRequest inherit ).
I've checked JSR 168 and PLT3.1 states that
"Attributes set in the portlet request are
available in the included servlet request", but
from the above it seems that this is only true of
renderRequests. Is this a bug in my Portal server
(Vignette 7 Trial Edition)?