Access Session attribute on jstl

Question

I am trying to access a session attribute from a jsp page which is set and dispatched by a servlet, but I am getting the error message \"jsp:attribute must be the subelement

Answer 1

You don't need the jsp:useBean to set the model if you already have a controller which prepared the model.

Just access it plain by EL:

<p>${Questions.questionPaperID}</p>
<p>${Questions.question}</p>

or by JSTL <c:out> tag if you'd like to HTML-escape the values or when you're still working on legacy Servlet 2.3 containers or older when EL wasn't supported in template text yet:

<p><c:out value="${Questions.questionPaperID}" /></p>
<p><c:out value="${Questions.question}" /></p>

See also:

• Our Servlets wiki page

---

Unrelated to the problem, the normal practice is by the way to start attribute name with a lowercase, like you do with normal variable names.

session.setAttribute("questions", questions);

and alter EL accordingly to use ${questions}.

Also note that you don't have any JSTL tag in your code. It's all plain JSP.

Answer 2

You should definitely avoid using <jsp:...> tags. They're relics from the past and should always be avoided now.

Use the JSTL.

Now, wether you use the JSTL or any other tag library, accessing to a bean property needs your bean to have this property. A property is not a private instance variable. It's an information accessible via a public getter (and setter, if the property is writable). To access the questionPaperID property, you thus need to have a

public SomeType getQuestionPaperID() {
    //...
}

method in your bean.

Once you have that, you can display the value of this property using this code :

<c:out value="${Questions.questionPaperID}" />

or, to specifically target the session scoped attributes (in case of conflicts between scopes) :

<c:out value="${sessionScope.Questions.questionPaperID}" />

Finally, I encourage you to name scope attributes as Java variables : starting with a lowercase letter.