Head First Servlets and JSP, 2nd Edition

But what if the property is something OTHER than a String or primitive?

We know how easy it is to print an attribute when the attribute itself is a String. Then we made an attribute that was a non-String object (a Person bean instance). But we didn’t want to print the attribute (person)—we wanted to print a property of the attribute (in our example, the person’s name and empID). That worked fine, because the standard actions can handle String and primitive properties. So, we know that standard actions can deal with an attribute of any type, as long as all the attribute’s properties are Strings or primitives.

But what if they’re not? What if the bean has a property that is not a String or primitive? What if the property is yet another Object type? An Object type with properties of its own?

What if what we really want is to print a property of that property?

• Person has a String “name” property.

• Person has a Dog “dog” property.

• Dog has a String “name” property.

Note

What if we want to print the name of the Person’s dog?

Servlet code