Question

I am having a little trouble figuring out how to do and’s on EL expressions in Facelets.
So basically I have:

<h:outputText id="Prompt"
    value="Fobar" 
    rendered="#{beanA.prompt == true && beanB.currentBase !=null}" />

But I keep getting:

Error Traced[line: 69] The entity name must immediately follow the ‘&’
in the entity reference.

Answer 1

Facelets is a XML based view technology. The & is a special character in XML representing the start of an entity like & which ends with the ; character. You’d need to either escape it, which is ugly:

rendered="#{beanA.prompt == true && beanB.currentBase != null}"

or to use the and keyword instead, which is preferred as to readability and maintainability:

rendered="#{beanA.prompt == true and beanB.currentBase != null}"

See also:

• Java EE 6 tutorial – Operators in EL

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Unrelated to the concrete problem, comparing booleans with booleans makes little sense when the expression expects a boolean outcome already. I’d get rid of == true:

rendered="#{beanA.prompt and beanB.currentBase != null}"