Core Servlets and JavaServer Pages™

14.4. Including the Tag Body

Up to this point, all of the custom tags you have seen ignore the tag body and thus are used as stand-alone tags of the form

<prefix:tagname />

In this section, we see how to define tags that use their body content, and are thus used in the following manner:

<prefix:tagname>body</prefix:tagname>

The Tag Handler Class

In the previous examples, the tag handlers defined a doStartTag method that returned SKIP_BODY. To instruct the system to make use of the body that occurs between the new element's start and end tags, your doStartTag method should return EVAL_BODY_INCLUDE instead. The body content can contain JSP scripting elements, directives, and actions, just like the rest of the page. The JSP constructs are translated ...