Accessing Bean Properties

Beans are objects: structured variables that instead of holding a single value, hold a set of related values called properties. A PresentationArticle bean, for example, has more than 40 properties describing various aspects of a content item. Its articleId property contains a unique ID for the content item, its createdDateAsDate property contains the date on which it was created, its author property is another bean containing information about the author of the content item.

You can access these properties with the JSP expression language by using dot notation. You simply add the name of the property you are interested in to the end of the bean name, separated by a dot. To access the article request bean's articleId property, for example, you can use:

${article.articleId}

A bean property may be a reference to another bean rather than a simple string or number. PresentationArticle's author property, for example, is a reference to a Person bean. In this case, you can use the same notation to access that bean's properties. You can, for example access the name of the author of a content item as follows:

${article.author.name}