The bean:write tag has an attribute for "ignore". It seems that with ignore set to true, and a null value is passed in for the bean, the write tag will avoid a null pointer exception. However in a situation where you have a bean with nested properties, if one of those properties is null then you still get the null pointer exception and your page crashes. I support our internal developers in their Stuts efforts, and we are converting several apps from a proprietary app server to be "J2EE compliant". This is a "must" for our staff in their conversion efforts. So I modified the bean:write tag to also ignore null nested properties if ignore is true. Finally, my question is: Does this make sense as a Struts base mod? Essentially then I could write <bean:write name="bean" property="foo.bar.name" ignore="true"/> where bean is not null, bean.getFoo() is not null, but bean.getFoo().getBar() returns null. And my page simply ignores the bean write without crashing.