JSF 1.2: EL binding to null Strings show up as empty strings

• Key: TRINIDAD-381
• Type: Bug
• Status: Resolved
• Resolution: Fixed
• Priority: Major
• Assignee: Adam Winer
• Reporter: Adam Winer
• Affects Version/s: 2.0.0-incubating-core-SNAPSHOT
• Fix Version/s: 2.0.0-incubating-core-SNAPSHOT

Description

Take:

        <tr:outputText value="foo" styleClass="#{notthere}" shortDesc="#{nowway}"/>

Prior to 1.2, this generated no "class" or "title" attribute, because these EL
bindings return null.

Now, in 1.2, these being strings, we tell the JSP system that these are deferred-values
of type java.lang.String. And, the silly coercion rules then convert every null to
"".

So, we get:

   <span title="" class="">foo</span>

Comments

[Adam Winer]

Fixed. We no longer use
  <deferred-value>
     <type>java.lang.String</type>
  </deferred-value>

It's just:

  <deferred-value/>

This means that we have to handle coercion in our own code, but
we were doing this already because of 1.1.

[Bruno Aranda]

For MyFaces 1.2 TLD compliance we really need to be able to have things like

<deferred-value>
     <type>java.lang.String</type>
  </deferred-value>

(for instance, the dataTable "var" attribute)

As well as other deferred value types, such as javax.faces.component.UIComponent.

So for MyFaces, this is a must