Head First Servlets and JSP, 2nd Edition

Trying to display the property of the property

We know we can do it with scripting, but can we do it with the bean standard actions? What happens if we put “dog” as the property in the <jsp:getProperty> tag?

Without standard actions (using scripting)

What we WANT What we GOT

You can’t say: property=“dog.name”

There’s no combination of the bean standard actions that’ll work given the original servlet code, because the Dog is not an attribute! Dog is a property of the attribute, so you can display the Dog, but you can’t navigate to the name property of the Dog property of the Person attribute.

The <jsp:getProperty> lets you access only the properties of the bean attribute. There’s no capability for nested properties, where you want a property of a property, rather than a property of the attribute.