Using EL in custom tags as attributes

Problem:
I was working on a custom tag and i needed to pass it a bean from a JSP page kind of like this:
<customtag var="${somebean.something.else}">
I realized that what i was getting inside my custom tag was a String, not my bean.

Solution:
You need to use the ExpressionEvaluator to evaluate the expression, and get the bean, here is the code i used in my SimpleTag: (i was getting a Date object by the way)

<br /><br />ExpressionEvaluator eval = getJspContext().getExpressionEvaluator();<br />Date date = null;<br />//dateVar this is the EL expression<br />try { //this thing here resolves the date expression into a java object!<br /> date = (Date)eval.evaluate(dateVar, Date.class, getJspContext().getVariableResolver(), new FunctionMapper(){<br />public Method resolveFunction(String arg0, String arg1) {<br /> return null; //i couldnt figure out how to get a FunctionMapper from somewhere...<br />}<br /> });<br />} catch (ELException e1) {<br /> throw new JspException(e1);<br />}<br />


Edit Aug 7, 2008:
It has come to my attention that in jsp 2.0 the EL expressions are evaluated before being passed to the custom tags, so you dont need to do any of this crap anymore.