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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-28T13:55:30+00:00

I am converting an existing Tiles 1 webapp to Tiles 2 architecture. I am

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I am converting an existing Tiles 1 webapp to Tiles 2 architecture. I am having trouble passing values from JSP page to tiles attributes.

Here is my tiles definition file (tiles-definition.xml)

<tiles-definitions>

    <definition name="cda.layout" template="/jsp/layouts/layout.jsp">
        <put-attribute name="pageTitle" value="StoryTitle" type="string"/>
        <put-attribute name="pageHeader" value="StoryHeader" type="string"/>
        <put-attribute name="resources" value="" type="string"/>
    </definition>

</tiles-definitions>

The layout.jsp looks like:

<html>
    <head>
    <title><tiles:insertAttribute name="pageTitle" flush="true"/></title> 
    </head>

    <body>
    ...
    ...

    <div class="content">
    <h1><tiles:insertAttribute name="pageHeader" flush="true"/></h1>
    </div>

    ...
    ...
    </body>
</html>

I have a story page which uses the layout and need to pass values to template attributes.

    <%
    // create a business object and populate
    String mytitle= story.getTitle();
    String myheader = story.getHeader();
    %>

<tiles:insertTemplate template="../layouts/layout.jsp"  flush="false" >
    <tiles:putAttribute name="pageTitle" value="${mytitle}"/>
    <tiles:putAttribute name="pageHeader"value="${myheader}"/>
</tiles:insertTemplate>

In the story.jsp, I can System.out.print() the values for mytitle, myheader and they are showing correct. But, these values are NOT passed on to the tile attributes.

Any idea how to fix this?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    ${mytitle} is a JSP EL expression which means: find an attribute in page scope, or request scope, or session scope, or application scope, named “mytitle”.

    By defining a scriptlet variable, you haven’t defined an attribute in any of these scopes. It would work if you had

    pageContext.setAttribute("mytitle", mytitle);

    But using scriptlets in JSPs is bad practice. I don’t know where your story bean comes from, but it’s probably a request attribute. If so, you can define a new page-scope attribute this way, using the JSTL:

    <c:set var="mytitle" value="${story.title}"/>

    This is unnecessary though, since you could use this expression directly in the tiles tag:

    <tiles:putAttribute name="pageTitle" value="${story.title}"/>

    Read more about the JSP EL in this tutorial.

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