Tag Handler Manipulates the Body

If the tag handler needs to manipulate the body, the tag handler must implement BodyTag (or must be derived from BodyTagSupport).

When a tag handler implements the BodyTag interface, it must implement the doInitBody and the doAfterBody methods. These methods manipulate body content passed to the tag handler by the JSP page’s servlet.

A BodyContent object supports several methods to read and write its contents. A tag handler can use the body content’s getString or getReader method to extract information from the body, and the writeOut(out) method to write the body contents to an out stream. The writer supplied to the writeOut method is obtained using the tag handler’s getPreviousOut method. This method is used to ensure that a tag handler’s results are available to an enclosing tag handler.

If the body of the tag needs to be evaluated, the doStartTag method must return EVAL_BODY_BUFFERED; otherwise, it should return SKIP_BODY.

doInitBody Method

The doInitBody method is called after the body content is set but before it is evaluated. You generally use this method to perform any initialization that depends on the body content.

doAfterBody Method

The doAfterBody method is called after the body content is evaluated. doAfterBody must return an indication of whether to continue evaluating the body. Thus, if the body should be evaluated again, as would be the case if you were implementing an iteration tag, doAfterBody should return EVAL_BODY_AGAIN; otherwise, doAfterBody should return SKIP_BODY.

The following example reads the content of the body (which contains an SQL query) and passes it to an object that executes the query. Because the body does not need to be reevaluated, doAfterBody returns SKIP_BODY.

public class QueryTag extends BodyTagSupport {
    public int doAfterBody() throws JspTagException {
        BodyContent bc = getBodyContent();
        // get the bc as string
        String query = bc.getString();
        // clean up
        bc.clearBody();
        try {
            Statement stmt = connection.createStatement();
            result = stmt.executeQuery(query);
        } catch (SQLException e) {
            throw new JspTagException("QueryTag: " +
                 e.getMessage());
        }
        return SKIP_BODY;
    }
}

release Method

A tag handler should reset its state and release any private resources in the release method.