JavaServer Pages, 3rd Edition

Capturing Parameter Values Using a Bean

As you may remember from Chapter 6, a bean is often used as a container for data, created by some server process and used in a JSP page to display the data. But a bean can also be used to capture user input. The captured data can then be processed by the bean itself or used as input to some other server component (e.g., a component that stores the data in a database or picks an appropriate banner ad to display).

To capture the user input from the example form, I have implemented a bean named com.ora.jsp.beans.userinfo.UserInfoBean , with the properties described in Table 8-4.

Table 8-4. Properties for com.ora.jsp.beans.userinfo.UserInfoBean

Property name	Java type	Access	Description
userName	String	Read-write	The user’s full name
birthDate	String	Read-write	The user’s birth date in the format yyyy-mm-dd (e.g., 2002-01-23)
emailAddr	String	Read-write	The user’s email address in the format [e-mail]
gender	String	Read-write	The user’s gender (m or f)
luckyNumber	String	Read-write	The user’s lucky number (between 1 and 100)
food	String[]	Read/write	The user’s favorite food (any combination of z, p, and c)

As shown in the “Access” column in Table 8-4, all properties are read/write, meaning that, in addition to using the bean’s properties to generate output, the property values can be set based on user input.

Example 8-4 shows the last part of a JSP page that uses the bean to capture the user input ...