Apache Struts 2 Documentation > Home > Guides > Tag Developers Guide > Struts Tags > Tag Reference > Generic Tag Reference > bean
Added by digi9ten, last edited by Don Brown on Jan 06, 2007  (view change)
Please make sure you have read the Tag Syntax document and understand how tag attribute syntax works.

Description

Instantiates a class that conforms to the JavaBeans specification. This tag has a body which can contain a number of Param elements to set any mutator methods on that class.

If the id attribute is set on the BeanTag, it will place the instantiated bean into the stack's Context.

Parameters

Name

Required

Default

Evaluated

Type

Description

id false true String id for referencing element. For UI and form tags it will be used as HTML id attribute
name true true String The class name of the bean to be instantiated (must respect JavaBean specification)

Examples

<-- in freemarker form -->
[@s.bean name="org.apache.struts2.example.counter.SimpleCounter" id="counter"]
  [s:param name="foo" value="BAR"/]
  The value of foo is : [s:property value="foo"/], when inside the bean tag.<br />
[/s:bean]

<-- in jsp form -->
<s:bean name="org.apache.struts2.example.counter.SimpleCounter" id="counter">
  <s:param name="foo" value="BAR" />
  The value of foot is : <s:property value="foo"/>, when inside the bean tag <br />
</s:bean>

This example instantiates a bean called SimpleCounter and sets the foo property (setFoo('BAR')). The SimpleCounter object is then pushed onto the Valuestack, which means that we can call its accessor methods (getFoo()) with the Property tag and get their values.

In the above example, the id has been set to a value of counter. This means that the SimpleCounter class will be placed into the stack's context. You can access the SimpleCounter class using a Struts tag:

<-- jsp form -->
<s:property value="#counter" />

<-- freemarker form --> [s:property value="#counter.foo"/]

In the property tag example, the # tells Ognl to search the context for the SimpleCounter class which has an id(key) of counter