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

I have tried to use simple quotes directly without using charAt(0) tips ...

and this work correctly when parameter type is char or Character.

Example passing a character:

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

Example passing a String literal and a character constant:

<p:panel style="border:none;#{vC.traceUpdate('p:panel','X')}">

The code of traceUpdate() java method is following:

@ManagedBean(name = "vC")
@ViewScoped
public class ActionViewController
extends AbstractViewController
    {
    public String traceUpdate(String s, Character c)
        {
        System.out.println("s:" + s + " " + c);
        return "";
        }

OR

@ManagedBean(name = "vC")
@ViewScoped
public class ActionViewController
extends AbstractViewController
    {
    public String traceUpdate(String s, char c)
        {
        System.out.println("s:" + s + " " + c);
        return "";
        }

where Character as been replace by char

This example run on Glassfish 4.1 using Primefaces 6.2.4.

Answer 2

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.