Last time, I said that my next post would delve into operations and comparisons in EL, but I figured first it would be good to have a real-use example of what I talked about last time.

In several of my apps lately, I've taken to using properties files to store app configuration, primarily the server and file paths for the databases that store the actual data. The standard way of doing this is to use the platform's built-in bundle-handling abilities. However, that'd leave me stuck with either putting the bundle reference in the XSP markup somewhere or in a theme - the former would muddy things up and the latter is not available at page-load time. So instead, I wrote a quick class to use as an application-scoped bean, making it available everywhere via EL and Java:

package config;

import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.Serializable;
import java.util.Locale;
import java.util.ResourceBundle;
import javax.faces.context.FacesContext;
import com.ibm.xsp.application.ApplicationEx;
import com.ibm.xsp.model.DataObject;

public class AppConfig implements Serializable, DataObject {
	private static final long serialVersionUID = -5125445506949601097L;

	private transient ResourceBundle config;

	public Class<?> getType(final Object keyObject) {
		return String.class;
	}

	public Object getValue(final Object keyObject) {
		if(!(keyObject instanceof String)) { throw new IllegalArgumentException(); }
		return getConfig().getString((String)keyObject);
	}

	public boolean isReadOnly(final Object keyObject) { return true; }

	public void setValue(final Object keyObject, final Object value) { }

	private ResourceBundle getConfig() {
		if (config == null) {
			try {
				ApplicationEx app = (ApplicationEx) FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().getApplication();
				config = app.getResourceBundle("config", Locale.getDefault());
			} catch (IOException ioe) {
				ioe.printStackTrace();
			}
		}
		return config;
	}
}

This is an example of a simple read-only DataObject implementation. There are only four methods to implement: getType, which returns the class of the value for the key; getValue, which returns the actual value; isReadOnly, which determines whether a given key is settable (always false here); and setValue, which would set the value for the key if I wasn't making it read-only.

It's pretty straightforward to take this idea and apply it to any of your Map-like objects to ease their use in EL without having to implement or stub-out the dozen or so methods demanded by the actual Map interface.

One of the main aspects to cleaning up the code of an XPage is the heavy use of Expression Language (EL), which is XPages/JSF's shorthand language for binding properties to values and methods. The most common kind you'll run across is the kind you get for "free" when working with document data sources:

<xp:inputText value="#{doc.FirstName}"/>

This is the essence of EL in a nutshell: the actual code behind the scenes can be pretty complex, but EL handles that for you. It goes far beyond this, though, in two important ways: accessing custom and non-Domino data sources and writing complex operations.

Accessing Custom Data Sources

In addition to accessing "built-in" data types like Domino documents and the scope variables, EL is generic enough to deal with several kinds of data access (technically, it ONLY does these, and the standard bindings are examples of it):

• Lists (and probably arrays). EL can use bracketed-subscript notation to reference individual elements of a Java list/array, e.g. #{names[3]}. I've found this to be the rarest use, but it could be useful if repeating over two parallel lists.
• Maps. This is how EL accesses the scope variables (requestScope, viewScope, etc.). It translates code like #{sessionScope.cart} to sessionScope.get("cart") and sessionScope.put("cart", ...).
• DataObjects. This is basically a "Map-lite" interface from IBM that is meant for making generic key/value objects easily-accessible via EL - this is what Domino document objects implement. It translates code like #{doc.FirstName} to doc.getValue("FirstName") and doc.setValue("FirstName", ...).
• Generic bean-style methods. If (and only if) your object doesn't implement any of the above interfaces, EL falls back to seeking out bean-style getters and setters. For example, if you have a class that implements no special interfaces, EL will attempt to match #{myObject.foo} to myObject.getFoo() (or myObject.isFoo()) and myObject.setFoo(...).

The first important thing to remember is that EL applies these rules to your own and third-party objects just as much as it does to IBM's stock objects. If your code is just #{doc.foo}, you can switch "doc" from a Domino document to a HashMap, a custom DataObject class, a bean with getFoo, or an entirely-different third-party data source that implements one of those and it will continue to work smoothly. If you instead wrote it as #{javascript:doc.getItemValueString('foo')}, your experience would be... a bit rougher.

The second important thing to remember is EL's equivalence between dot and bracket notations. What I mean by this is that these three are all equivalent (assuming "barHolder" is a variable on the page containing the string "bar"):

• #{foo.bar}
• #{foo['bar']} or #{foo["bar"]}
• #{foo[barHolder]}

Note that those are equivalent for every supported object type, including generic beans (okay, but not Lists, because #{foo.1} is illegal). This equivalence allows you to use EL to reference keys that would not be legal in dot notation (e.g. #{someProperties['us.iksg.setting']}) and to use other EL expressions to determine the field name. Say you're keeping some user-specific info in the application scope; you could end up with a chain like this to access it via EL:

<xp:text value="#{applicationScope.userCache[context.user.name].ticketCount}"/>

The more you understand the different ways of accessing your objects via EL, the more you can remove SSJS from your XPage markup and make your apps cleaner, (probably) faster, and more portable.

In my next post, I will cover the second major topic: complex operations and comparisons in EL.