Capitalizing an entire word in Struts2 / OGNL - struts2

I just can't see it. I want to do the equivalent of the following:
listValue="%{capitalize(remoteUserName)}"
inside an s:select tag.
According to the struts documentation http://struts.apache.org/2.0.11.2/struts2-core/apidocs/com/opensymphony/xwork2/inject/util/Strings.html there exists a capitalize function. I have tried both the above and Strings.capitalize to try to capitalize remoteUserName.
Wandering through what is left of OGNL documentation at http://incubator.apache.org/ognl/, I don't see a way immediately to capitalize in this way.
So what then is the syntax to capitalize when using struts 2 tags?
EDIT:
I realize that the idea I put forth was to capitalize just the first letter of the word. Really, I would like each character in the word capitalized.

Here is an example of using com.opensymphony.xwork2.inject.util.Strings (has been tested)
<s:property value="#com.opensymphony.xwork2.inject.util.Strings#capitalize(myString)"/>
This requires that static method invocation be enabled, to do that simply add,
<struts>
<constant name="struts.ognl.allowStaticMethodAccess" value="true"/>
</struts>
into struts.xml
Edit: Just so others know (you probably already do) you can use any of the methods of java.lang.String ie: myString.toUpperCase() is a valid expression and you could use a regular expression and the java.lang.String methods replaceFirst or replaceAll to achieve the desired result.
If com.opensymphony.xwork2.inject.util.Strings capitalize method does not meet your needs this question covers other methods which might be useful: How to capitalize the first character of each word in a string

Related

Meaning of empty from, empty create etc. in expression language

I came across some .xhtml files where for some components the expression language used was like rendered="#{empty from}", rendered="#{empty create}" etc.
I know that empty is an operator in EL, used to check whether a value is null or empty, but I did not understand the meaning of above mentioned ELs.
Can somebody explain to me what above EL's mean?
The rendered attribute is a signal whether JSF should generate HTML for the component or not. If it evaluates false, then it won't generate HTML for the component (nor for its children). The #{empty form} will evaluate false when the #{form} is not null nor empty.
Simple as that. You can find another examples of boolean expressions here: Conditionally displaying JSF components

Why do ampersands (&) need to be encoded in JSF? Is there a way around this?

I often have Javascript on my JSF XHTML pages that has && in it, which I end up having to encode as &&
For example, when I place the following in my JSF XHTML page file:
I am an & sign
I get the error:
The entity name must immediately follow the '&' in the entity reference
One wayto fix this appears to be to change the '&' to & which I find undesirable to just writing '&'.
It also appears that for cases where I use the '&' in Javascript, I can wrap the Javascript in CDATA tags; when wrapped in CDATA tags, I can then write '&' without having to escape it as &, which is a good workaround to be able to have more readable Javascript code on my page.
But what happens when I want to use the literal '&' elsewhere on the page when it is not within <script> tags and therefore cannot as easily wrap the code in CDATA tags? Must I always escape '&' as & for these cases?
Note trying to use 's ability to escape values and do not seem to be able to fix the issue
Facelets is a XML based view technology. Any characters which have special treatment by the XML parser needs to be XML-escaped when the intent is to present them literally. That covers among others < and &. The < indicates the start of a XML tag like so <foo> and the & indicates the start of a XML entity like so &. The < must be escaped as < and the & as &.
Not escaping them in Facelets would result in the following exception for <
javax.faces.view.facelets.FaceletException: Error Parsing /test.xhtml: Error Traced[line: 42] The content of elements must consist of well-formed character data or markup.
and the following one for &
javax.faces.view.facelets.FaceletException: Error Parsing /test.xhtml: Error Traced[line: 42] The entity name must immediately follow the '&' in the entity reference.
This is not specifically related to JavaScript, this applies to the entire view, including "plain text". Those characters just happen to be JavaScript operators as well. There's no way to go around this, that's just how XML is specified. In JavaScript, there's however one more way to avoid escaping or using CDATA blocks: just put that JS code in its own .js file which you load by <script> or <h:outputScript>.
In EL, there is also the && operator which also needs to be escaped as && as well, but fortunately there's an alias for this operator, the and operator.
See also:
Mozilla Developer Network - Writing JavaScript for XHTML
It's because & is special characters in XML : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_and_HTML_character_entity_references
FYI, I tried to write the (c) character in my JSF page.
An error was raised when I wrote &copy : "copy is referenced but not declared"
When I wrote © I got the raw string back.
I could display the special character using the unicode notation : ©
This code worked for me :
<h:outputText value="&copy;" escape="false" />

JSF 2.0 cannot find component id in view

I have given the id of the input text with date_m. When I try to access the page it gives an error saying component id date_m not found in view. But I do not get this error when the id is changed to date-m. Does JSF not allow underscore for id's? IN our project the javax.faces.SEPARATOR_CHAR is underscore.
<h:inputText id="date_m" value="{bean.month}"/>
<h:message id="error" for="date_m"/>
The component ID should not contain the same character as the separator character. That's among others why the default separator character is :. You cannot use it in the component ID, it would be invalidated according the rules of UIComponent#setId(), but it is allowed in HTML element IDs.
However, if you change the default separator character by a javax.faces.SEPARATOR_CHAR context parameter to a character which is allowed in component IDs, then you should be double as careful when specifying component IDs. You should namely make sure that you don't use exactly the separator character in the component ID, otherwise the UIViewRoot#findComponent() method may break. This method is internally used by JSF to find components by client ID.
So, if your separator character is _, then you should use it nowhere in your component IDs. The logical consequence is to consequently use - instead.
See also:
How to use JSF generated HTML element ID with colon ":" in CSS selectors?
If your separator character is "_" then I think you have confused the lookup algorithm by using an underscore in your id field.
Try removing the underscore (from "date_m" to "datem") and see what happens then.

ASP.NET MVC Colon in URL

I've seen that IIS has a problem with letting colons into URLs. I also saw the suggestions others offered here.
With the site I'm working on, I want to be able to pass titles of movies, books, etc., into my URL, colon included, like this:
mysite.com/Movie/Bob:The Return
This would be consumed by my MovieController, for example, as a string and used further down the line.
I realize that a colon is not ideal. Does anyone have any other suggestions? As poor as it currently is, I'm doing a find-and-replace from all colons (:) to another character, then a backwards replace when I want to consume it on the Controller end.
I resolved this issue by adding this to my web.config:
<httpRuntime requestPathInvalidCharacters=""/>
This must be within the system.web section.
The default is:
<httpRuntime requestPathInvalidCharacters="<,>,*,%,&,:,\,?"/>
So to only make an exception for the colon it would become
<httpRuntime requestPathInvalidCharacters="<,>,*,%,&,\,?"/>
Read more at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.configuration.httpruntimesection.requestpathinvalidcharacters.aspx
For what I understand the colon character is acceptable as an unencoded character in an URL. I don't know why they added it to the default of the requestPathInvalidCharacters.
Consider URL encoding and decoding your movie titles.
You'd end up with foo.com/bar/Bob%58The%20Return
As an alternative, consider leveraging an HTML helper to remove URL unfriendly characters in URLs (method is URLFriendly()). The SEO benefits between a colon and a placeholder (e.g. a dash) would likely be negligable.
One of the biggest worries with your approach is that the movie name isn't always going to be unique (e.g. "The Italian Job"). Also what about other ilegal characters (e.g. brackets etc).
It might be a good idea to use an id number in the url to locate the movie in your database. You could still include a url friendly copy of movie name in your url, but you wouldn't need to worry about getting back to the original title with all the illegal characters in it.
A good example is the url to this page. You can see that removing the title of the page still works:
ASP.NET MVC Colon in URL
ASP.NET MVC Colon in URL
Colon is a reserved and invalid character in an URI according to the RFC 3986. So don't do something that violates the specification. You need to either URL encode it or use another character. And here's a nice blog post you might take a look at.
The simplest way is to use System.Web.HttpUtility.UrlEncode() when building the url
and System.Web.HttpUtility.UrlDecode when interpreting the results coming back. You would also have problems with the space character if you don't encode the value first.

Accessing a HashMap using Struts 2

I have hashmap that was created on a page using the struts2 <s:set> tag. It looks something like this
<s:set var="mymap" value="#request.mymap"/>
At some point in the page, i need to get a value from the hashmap based upon a key, and i want to do it using OGNL.
The key is generated based upon some logic, which i store using another <s:set> tag. Something like this
<s:set var="mykey" value="1">
I need to get a value from the hashmap using this key. And I need to display it.
How do I simply call the get function on the hashmap?
I tried this
<s:property value="#mymap[#mykey]"/>
and this
<s:property value="#mymap[%{#mykey}]"/>
and this
<s:property value="%{#mymap[%{#mykey}}]"/>
The third one obviously does not work because of the nesting problem.
But the same nesting logic is applicable to the second case as well, due to the manner the value attribute is handled. However none seem to work for me.
The issue here is that my key is unknown. It is a dynamically generated string based upon some pattern. I need to access the object stored in the hashmap using this dynamic key. And due to the inability of nesting ognl, I am in a fix.
I suppose the issue is very simple. I almost feel that I get it, but somehow the solution eludes me.
I suppose I was using a different version of struts wherein using the %{} was required for the expression to be evaluated. I changed the jar files now.
This is what did the job for me:
<s:property value="#mymap.[#mykey2]"/>
My problem was coming because I was trying to use it in a href for a s:a tag. And without the %{} operator, the expression was not being evaluated.
So, i guess, i was right in the beginning itself. Rest of the time, it was just me being silly. :>
Update:
I wrote a blog post on the issue, in case anyone is interested.
http://mycodefixes.blogspot.com/2010/11/struts-2-creating-and-accessing-maps.html

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