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}

Note that the JavaDoc tag

jsp.attribute

is used to define the property as an

attribute. This code generates the following in the TLD file within the definition:

Custom tags, with all of their variables and attributes, can be hard to manage and keep

in sync. As you can see from the example, XDoclet can make short order of what

would otherwise be chaos, and it allows you to define all of this needed metadata in

one file instead of two. This makes doing custom tags a lot easier  maybe easy enough

for you to start fitting Custom Tags into your project.

Imagine refactoring and changing the name of a getter and setter method

corresponding to an attribute. Without XDoclet you would have to spelunk through the

TLD file. What a pain!

This is all well and good, but how do you take the Java source files and generate the

TLD file?

Adding TagLib generation to XDoclet

You need to write an Ant script that uses the

webdoclet

task from XDoclet. The listing

below modifies the code from the earlier

webdoclet

listing to add support for custom

tags under the target

generateDD

. Just as before, the input files for the

webdoclet

task are specified with a nested fileset, except, this time you added a new include

directive to include your tag handler (that is,