Custom tag in JSP not working with Spring Session filter

Question

I am trying to implement Spring Session on a legacy application. Everything seems to be working except I found an issue where a custom TagSupport has a problem.

I am not very familiar with tags, but I will try to explain the problem. The TagSupport class gets an object out of the session and does a check on it to see if some portion of the JSP should be displayed or not.

The code looks similar to this:

public int doStartTag() throws JspException {
    //get object from session
    ServletRequestAttributes attr = (ServletRequestAttributes) RequestContextHolder.currentRequestAttributes();
    HttpSession session = attr.getRequest().getSession(true);
    Foo foo = (Foo)session.getAttribute("foo");

    if(foo!= null){
        return Tag.EVAL_BODY_INCLUDE;
    }
    return Tag.SKIP_BODY;
}

The problem is.. When I debug I see the code inside the doStartTag() method is executed multiple times. The first two times foo is populated correctly and the method gives the desired return value, but then it executes the method 3 more times and foo is null. (the tag is called twice on the page I am trying to load.)

If I remove the springSessionRepositoryFilter from my web.xml the doStartTag method is still executed multiple times, but every time the fooobject is populated and the web page renders correctly.

I'm not sure why the doStartTag() code is executed multiple times although I don't think that's the problem. I verified the controller is only hit once. I've tried debugging what happens in between but it's very in the weeds. I can also see I have two session objects, one called JESSIONID and the SESSION. I'm not sure if that's a problem either.

I'm in a little over my head and if anyone has any pointers it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much.

I implemented spring session using the guide here: http://docs.spring.io/spring-session/docs/current/reference/html5/guides/httpsession-xml.html In the process I updated some spring libraries so a library conflict isn't out of the question.