Showing posts from September, 2014

Getting the target of value expressions

In the Java EE platform programmers have a way to reference values in beans via textual expressions. These textual expressions are then compiled by the implementation (via the Expression Language, AKA EL spec) to instances of ValueExpression. E.g. the following EL expression can be used to refer to the named bean "foo" and its property "bar": #{} Expressions can be chains of arbitrary length, and can include method calls as well. E.g.: #{} An important aspect of these expressions is that they are highly contextual, specifically where it concerns the top level variables. These consists of the object that starts the chain ("foo" here) and any EL variables used as method arguments ("test" here). Because of this, it's not a totally unknown requirement for wanting to resolve the expression when it's still in context in order to obtain the so-called final base and the final property/method, the last one i…