Spring Expression Language: Calling A Method With Parameters [REPACK]

By default SpEL uses the conversion service available in Spring core (org.springframework.core.convert.ConversionService). This conversion service comes with many converters built in for common conversions but is also fully extensible so custom conversions between types can be added. Additionally it has the key capability that it is generics aware. This means that when working with generic types in expressions, SpEL will attempt conversions to maintain type correctness for any objects it encounters.

Spring Expression Language: Calling a Method with Parameters

The string is evaluated by concatenating the literal text 'random number is ' with the result of evaluating the expression inside the # delimiter, in this case the result of calling that random() method. The second argument to the method parseExpression() is of the type ParserContext. The ParserContext interface is used to influence how the expression is parsed in order to support the expression templating functionality. The definition of TemplateParserContext is shown below.

It is possible to invoke Java static methods directly with SpEL. Nussknacker can prevent invocationsof some of them due to security reasons. Invoking static methods is advanced functionality, which can leadto incomprehensible expressions, also code completions will not work with many of them.If you need to invoke the same method in many places, probably the best solution is to create additional helper.

Another advantage that @PreAuthorize presents over HttpSecurity is the use of SpEL. Spring Expression Language allows you to make authorization decisions based on complex expressions that can access built-in authentication objects (such as authentication and principal), dependency-injected method parameters, and query parameters. In this tutorial you will mostly look at two expressions: hasAuthority() and hasRole(). The Spring docs are again a great place to dig deeper.

Properties of an enum constant can also be referencedin this way. However, as with JavaBeans component properties, the propertiesof an Enum class must follow JavaBeans component conventions.This means that a property must at least have an accessor method called getProperty, where Property is the name of the property that can be referencedby an expression.

In the first expression syntax, expr-a isevaluated to represent a bean object. The expression expr-b is evaluated and cast to a string that representsa method in the bean represented by expr-a.In the second expression syntax, expr-a isevaluated to represent a bean object, and identifier-b isa string that represents a method in the bean object. The parameters in parentheses are the arguments for the method invocation.Parameters can be zero or more values or expressions, separated by commas.

Spring Data JPA allows manually defining the query to be executed by a repository method using the @Query annotation. Unfortunately parameter binding in JPQL is quite limited only allowing you to set a value and providing some type conversion. The latest Spring Data JPA M1 release of the Evans release train eases this pain by adding supportfor using SpEL expressions to use dynamically bound parameters within statements in @Query annotations which provides additional flexibility when defining queries manually. In this blog post, I am going to introduce you to the capabilities of this feature.

Parameters are exposed for indexed access ([0] in the first method) or via the name declared using @Param. The actual SpEL expression binding is either triggered by ?# or :#. We support both types to allow you to be consistent to standard JPQL parameter bindings that also might occur in the query definition.Parameters of special types like Sort and ```Pageable`` are exposed with their simple class names as variables.

Spring framework provides @Value annotation in the org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation package. This annotation is used at various level in our application either at field level for expression-driven dependency injection in which a value can be injected into a variable in a class or at the parameter level of a method or a constructor that indicates a default value expression for the main argument. It is also used for dynamic resolution of handler method parameters like in Spring MVC.

When the @Value annotation is found on a method, Spring context will invoke it when all the spring configurations and beans are getting loaded. If the method has multiple arguments, then every argument value is mapped from the method annotation. If we want different values for different arguments then we can use @Value annotation directly with the argument.

For straightforward method calls with scalar parameters, this works well. However, if your method invocation is more complicated, e.g. if it requires creating and passing objects to the method, moving it to a Script step is the way to go.

The POJO MyIdGenerator has one public method that accepts two parameters. We have also annotated this one with the @Header and @Body annotations to help Camel know what to bind here from the Exchange being processed.

Built-ins are like methods that are added to the objects by FreeMarker. To prevent name clashes with actual methods and other sub-variables, instead of dot (.), you separate them from the parent object with question mark (?). For example, if you want to ensure that path has an initial / then you could write path?ensure_starts_with('/'). The Java object behind path (a String most certainly) doesn't have such method, FreeMarker adds it. For brevity, if the method has no parameters, you must omit the (), like, to get the length of path, you have to write path?length, not path?length().

If you have a method then you can use the method call operation on it. The method call operation is a comma-separated list of expressions in parentheses. These values are called parameters. The method call operation passes these values to the method which will in turn return a result. This result will be the value of the whole method call expression.

The implementation delegates to Spring'sObjectUtils.ResolveType method for the actualtype resolution, which means that the types used within expressionsare resolved in the exactly the same way as the types specified inSpring configuration files.

A somewhat advanced, but a very powerful feature of Spring.NETExpression Language are lambda expressions. Lambda expressions allow youto define inline functions, which can then be used within yourexpressions just like any other function or method. You may also use.NET delegates as described in the next section.

Also, in both examples above we used an expression list in orderto define and invoke a function in a single expression. However, morelikely than not, you will want to define your functions once and thenuse them within as many expressions as you need. Spring.NET provides aneasy way to pre-register your lambda expressions by exposing a staticExpression.RegisterFunction method, which takesfunction name, lambda expression and variables dictionary to registerfunction in as parameters:

However, it is also easy to lose track of the actual cache key that is being used. The above call uses a default key generation strategy that creates a SimpleKey that consists of all the parameters with which the method was called. This requires the parameters to have a decent hashCode()/equals() implementation, which is not usually a problem in and of itself, except that the performance of hashCode() and equals() also impacts the performance of cache retrieval. Again, that's usually not much of an issue.

Create the spring-config.xml file (see below).Declare bean for RandomNumberGenerator class (see line 10 below).Populate the value randomNumber property by using the Spring Expression Language (see line 11 below). In the expression#T(java.lang.Math).random(), we use refer to thejava.lang.Mathclass by using the#Tjava.lang.Mathand refer to its static methodrandom()by using the dot (.) notation . This highlights the usage of referring a static method using Spring Expression Language. ]]>

(Alternatively you can go the folder containing the springexpressionlanguagestaticmethod-installer.jar and execute the jar usingjava -jar springexpressionlanguagestaticmethod-installer.jarcommand)

This source code for this program is downloaded in the folder specified by you (say, C:\Temp) as an eclipse project calledspringexpressionlanguagestaticmethod. All the required libraries have also been downloaded and placed in the same location. You can open this project from Eclipe IDE and directly browse the source code. See below for details of the project structure.

By using Spring Expression Language, you can call static methods or access static variables of both predefined Java classes as well as user defined ones. To access a static method of class java.lang.Math, you have to surround the class name with T() and then call our required method. So the syntax of SpEL expression to call static method will be like

Closure expressions are a way to write inline closures in a brief, focused syntax. Closure expressions provide several syntax optimizations for writing closures in a shortened form without loss of clarity or intent. The closure expression examples below illustrate these optimizations by refining a single example of the sorted(by:) method over several iterations, each of which expresses the same functionality in a more succinct way.

method expressions invoke a method with or without parameters. An exampleof method expression is $bean.setPropertyValue('newValue').To distinguish between a value expression and a methodexpression without any parameters, use empty parenthesesat the end of the method call. For example, $variable.toString().

In this article, we will look at the steps and configuration to enable spring method level security using the different annotations. Spring security supports both JSR-250 based annotation and Spring security based annotation, which allows us to use the new and powerful Spring expression language.