8.7. Nested Tags

The Struts custom tag libraries provide a great deal of power and flexibility to the developer. The freedom to access properties of a bean at any level using nested properties is very powerful.

There are some restrictions in how this technique can be deployed, however. When attempting to nest one tag inside another, the inside tag has certain dependencies on the outside tag that may make it cumbersome or impossible to cleanly render the dynamic data. There are workarounds, but these usually involve using scriptlets with Java within the JSP page. "Nested" tags were created to solve this problem and to enrich the Struts tag libraries.