JavaServer Pages, 3rd Edition

Name

pageContext

Synopsis

A PageContext instance provides access to all the JSP scopes and several page attributes. It offers a layer above the container-implementation details that enables a container to generate portable JSP implementation classes. The JSP page scope is represented by PageContext attributes. The web container assigns a unique instance of this class to the pageContext variable for each request.

The PageContext is provided to tag handler classes to give them access to the runtime context data. The class was refactored in JSP 2.0 to extend a generic context class: JspContext. All nonservlet specific methods were moved to the JspContext class, described in the Tag Handler Types section. Classic tag handlers are given an instance of PageContext but the new simple tag handler API uses the new JspContext type instead. In a servlet-based JSP container, the instance provided to a simple tag handler is always a PageContext, so tag handlers can safely cast the JspContext instance to a PageContext. These changes were made to allow the simple tag handler mechanism to be used in nonservlet based environments in the future.

Synopsis

Variable name:	pageContext
EL expression	${pageContext}
Class name:	javax.servlet.jsp.PageContext
Extends:	javax.servlet.jsp.JspContext
Implements:	None
Implemented by:	A concrete subclass of this abstract class is provided as an internal container-dependent class
JSP page type:	Available in both regular JSP pages and error pages

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