JSTL accessing properties on an object that extends ArrayList

I have an object that extends ArrayList and adds a bunch of properties (like title).

When I do this

<c:forEach items="${linkSet}" var="link" varStatus="status">

${linkSet.title}

</c:forEach>

I get this error :

<Error 500: The "." operator was supplied with an index value of type "java.lang.String" to be applied to a List or array, but that value cannot be converted to an integer.

Which implies that JSTL is treating "title" as an index value to get a value from the List - i.e. it's treating my extended List object as a simple List object.

Is there anyway to get JSTL to see it as a property on an the extended List object and not an index on the underlying List class ?

Not too sure extending ArrayList is the right idea, though I agree that it does appear that . is acting like [] here, which I hadn't noticed before.

My suggestion is that your extended class should actually have an ArrayList as an attribute, and not extend ArrayList.

Well, yes, I had thought of that. Except that this is an old and large code base being extended. This class is used all over the place, so re-factoring is not a small thing to do... was hoping to avoid that.

Ah, an old mistake.

So this is just a new JSP then?
Could you wrap the extended List into another object at the start of the JSP (with a note)?

That might do it I guess. I have a slightly ugly fix using in-line Java (grabbing the object from the pageContext). I'll consider re-factoring if there is more work in this code base. However, I still think the JSTL behaviour is not what I would expect to see.