Websphere fails on using reserved words in EL

Question

I've got a JSF1.2 application which deploys fine on Tomcat6 and Tomcat7. So far so good.

One of the pages contains the following property on a h:inputText:

 disabled="#{quoteFinance.quoteSaved or quoteRequest.quoteDisabled or setting.protected}"

This validates and works fine on aforementioned Tomcat servers. However, websphere8 believes this is a problem and throws the following error:

 disabled="#{quoteFinance.quoteSaved or quoteRequest.quoteDisabled or setting.protected}" [protected] is not a valid Java identifier
at com.sun.facelets.tag.TagAttribute.getValueExpression(TagAttribute.java:259)
at com.sun.facelets.tag.jsf.ComponentRule$ValueExpressionMetadata.applyMetadata(ComponentRule.java:69)
at com.sun.facelets.tag.MetadataImpl.applyMetadata(MetadataImpl.java:36)
at com.sun.facelets.tag.MetaTagHandler.setAttributes(MetaTagHandler.java:76)

Cause:
javax.el.ELException: [protected] is not a valid Java identifier
at org.apache.el.parser.AstDotSuffix.setImage(AstDotSuffix.java:45)
at org.apache.el.parser.ELParser.DotSuffix(ELParser.java:1067)
at org.apache.el.parser.ELParser.ValueSuffix(ELParser.java:1033)
at org.apache.el.parser.ELParser.Value(ELParser.java:978)
at org.apache.el.parser.ELParser.Unary(ELParser.java:948)
at org.apache.el.parser.ELParser.Multiplication(ELParser.java:712)
at org.apache.el.parser.ELParser.Math(ELParser.java:632)
at org.apache.el.parser.ELParser.Compare(ELParser.java:444)
at org.apache.el.parser.ELParser.Equality(ELParser.java:338)
at org.apache.el.parser.ELParser.And(ELParser.java:282)

I had a similar issue with #{msg.continue} which is perfectly fine, but because continue is a reserved word, WAS8 throws me an error.

• Why does websphere not accept this while the code is working perfectly?
• How can I resolve this problem?

Many thanks!

Answer 1

From the Expression Language 2.2 spec:

An identifier is constrained to be a Java identifier - e.g., no -, no /, etc.

protected can't be used as an identifier in Java as it is reserved.

This restriction applied in EL 2.1 too, so it was likely a bug in your old platform's EL parser that this ever worked.

Answer 2

This behaviour is as per EL specification. You need to rename the property name to something which isn't a Java literal, or you need to use the brace notation so that it can be referenced as String.

#{setting['protected']}

and

#{msg['continue']}

This should have failed in Tomcat 7 as well, perhaps you were using a rather old version of Tomcat 7. This was been "fixed" somewhere between 7.0.0 and 7.0.10. It's currently already at 7.0.28.

Answer 3

"protected" is a java reserved word too! just like "continue"