Passing a Character (vs passing String) to backing bean method in EL

Question

I would like to call a setter directly from a command button and pass a value. My problem is that the setter is expecting a Character and jsf if passing it back as a String. Is

Answer 1

This is unfortunately by design. Everything in quotes is in EL treated as String. A workaround would be to pass String#charAt() instead.

#{manageItemHandler.dataEntryOp.setBomComplete('Y'.charAt(0))}

This is only ugly. An alternative is to pass its int codepoint instead, which is 89 for Y.

#{manageItemHandler.dataEntryOp.setBomComplete(89)}

But this is not exactly self-documenting. Much better is to just make use of enums.

public enum Choice {
    Y, N;
}

with

protected Choice bomComplete;

which you can just invoke the desired way

#{manageItemHandler.dataEntryOp.setBomComplete('Y')}

The string 'Y' will be automatically converted to that enum. As a bonus, enums have many more additional advantages, such as compile time type safety.