How to run into and resolve EL PropertyNotFound exception and propertyNotReadable in JSF with private inner class

The other day on one of the projects I am involved with, we ran into an unexpected exception, from an innocent looking EL expression:

javax.el.PropertyNotFoundException: … value=”Book #{book.title}”: Missing Resource in EL implementation: ???propertyNotReadable???

We did nothing very special, or so we thought: simple JSF page that contains an iterator component that retrieves a list of objects from a managed bean and stamps output text components for every object.

The initial page rendered fine:

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based on an EL expression that uses the elements from the list but not the actual properties from those elements

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however…

when we changed the page to actually display properties of the book objects found in the list:

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We ran into a fairly horrible and as I said unexpected exception:

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It seems that even though the list of books can be found (#{librarian.library} does not caase any problems), the book elements themselves are not accessible.

javax.el.PropertyNotFoundException: … value=”Book #{book.title}”: Missing Resource in EL implementation: ???propertyNotReadable???

And that gave the clue that explained the issue to us. The librarian bean was defined like this:

package nl.amis.jsf.view;

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;

import javax.faces.bean.ManagedBean;
import javax.faces.bean.SessionScoped;

import nl.amis.jsf.PublicationI;

@ManagedBean (name="librarian")
@SessionScoped
public class Librarian {

    private List<Book>  library = new ArrayList<Book>();

    public Librarian() {
        library.add(new Book("The Help"," Kathryn Stockett",2010,"Penguin Group"));
        library.add(new Book("Hit List","Laurell K. Hamilton",2010,"Penguin Group"));
        library.add(new Book("WATER FOR ELEPHANTS","Sara Gruen",2009,"Algonquin"));
        library.add(new Book("Oracle SOA Suite 11g Handbook","Lucas Jellema",2010,"McGrawHill"));
        library.add(new Book("STATE OF WONDER","Ann Patchett",2011,"HarperCollins."));

    }

    public void setLibrary(List<Librarian.Book> library) {
        this.library = library;
    }

    public List<Librarian.Book> getLibrary() {
        return library;
    }

    private static class Book{
        private String title;
        private String author;
        private Integer    yearOfPublication;
        private String publisher;

        public Book(String title, String author, int yearOfPublication, String publisher) {
            super();
            this.title = title;
            this.author = author;
            this.yearOfPublication = yearOfPublication;
            this.publisher = publisher;
        }

        public void setTitle(String title) {
            this.title = title;
        }

        public String getTitle() {
            return title;
        }

        public void setAuthor(String author) {
            this.author = author;
        }

        public String getAuthor() {
            return author;
        }

        public void setYearOfPublication(Integer yearOfPublication) {
            this.yearOfPublication = yearOfPublication;
        }

        public Integer getYearOfPublication() {
            return yearOfPublication;
        }

        public void setPublisher(String publisher) {
            this.publisher = publisher;
        }

        public String getPublisher() {
            return publisher;
        }
    }
}

You can see that the Book class is a private inner class. This means apparently and not surprisingly that the EL resolution mechanism has no way of determining whether or not the book object it is inspecting while evaluating #{book.title} does indeed contain the title property. Whether it uses introspection or not – it simply cannot determine the class signature of the private inner class.

What did work – just to prove the point – was to create a public interface

package nl.amis.jsf;

public interface PublicationI {
    public String getTitle();
    public String getAuthor();
}

and have the private inner class implement that interface.

    private static class Book implements PublicationI{
        private String title;
        private String author;
...

That made the properties defined in the interface accessible to the EL resolution, even though it is still a private inner class implementing that interface.

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Of course if the page refers to a property on the book objects that has not been defined by a public interface, such as publisher or yearOfPublication, we are back to the originall exception.

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Resources

Download JSF 2.0 project (JDeveloper 11gR2) for this article ManagedBeanAndPrivateInnerClass.

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One Response

  1. Srikanth April 10, 2012