I kinda got bogged down to this particular example program in Beginning JavaServer Pages book. I can’t seem to make sense of this particular code segments. This is found in page 203. Just added the line no. for reference.


1. <jsp:useBean id="lineitems" class="java.util.ArrayList" scope="session"/>
2.
3. <c:choose>
4. <c:when test="${param.action == 'clear'}">
5. ${wxshop:clearList(lineitems)}
6. </c:when>
7.
8. <c:when test="${param.action == 'inc' || param.action=='buy'}">
9. <c:set var="found" value="false"/>
10.
11. <c:forEach var="curItem" items="${lineitems}">
12.
13. <c:if test="${(curItem.sku) == (prod.sku)}">
14. <jsp:setProperty name="curItem"
                      property="quantity"
15. value="${curItem.quantity + 1}"/>
16. <c:set var="found" value="true" />
17. </c:if>


On line no. 1, “lineitems” is of type ArrayList. Then we see on line no. 11, “curItem” takes on the object “lineitems” which is clearly of ArrayList type. Then to the heart of the problem: (on line no. 14) how in the world does “curItem” have access to the “quantity” property of LineItem.java when “lineitems” is declared as type “ArrayList” in line no. 1?

A lot of good things have been said on JSTL/EL, but, men, I think scriptlets are far better to understand than cryptic JSTL/EL.

I hope somebody can shed light to my problem. As you might have guessed, I’m a Java/JSP newbie. Thanks in advance

<c:forEach> iterates over each item in the "items" parameter, and puts the item itself into the variable defined in "var". Therefore, while inside <c:forEach>, in your example "curItem" equals an element inside the lineitems array. So when the jsp:setProperty is run on the curItem variable, it's affecting one of the items inside lineitems, not lineitems itself.

In Java, the above code would be something like this:

Iterator i = lineitems.iterator();
while (i.hasNext())
{
  Object curItem = i.next();

  /* As you can see, in here curItem is an element of
     lineitems. Note that jsp:setProperty uses reflection
     to run the getter and setter methods on curItem. */
}

Hope this helps!

Jon Emerson
http://www.jonemerson.net/

Thanks for your answer. Appreciate your time