Is there an alternative to printing content directly from a tag handler class?

[ruben depuben]

Hello,

My custom tag takes a string of keywords as a parameter and uses these to fetch a list of items from a web service. I want to print the list to the page as a HTML list. The obvious thing to do would be to iterate over the list in my tag handler class and use the JspWriter to write the items to the page. But isn't there an alternative? I don't like the idea of writing HTML code from Java. Wouldn't it be possible to use my custom tag to somehow make the list of items available in my JSP, so I can iterate over it with JSTL?

Thanks

[Bear Bibeault]

I wrote this article about doing something similar for JSP 1.2 (prior to tag files being introduced in JSP 2.0) at http://radio.javaranch.com/bear/2005/01/26/1106722509000.html

I nicknamed these "taglets".

It may be useful to adapt to what you want to do.

Or... you could invert it and use a tag file which invokes beans to do the Java stuff.