Question

I’m iterating a list of entities in a table. This entity has a list of objects that override the toString method to provide the “name” property of their instance. Let’s call them B objects.

In that table, I want to have a column where all values, as determined by calling their toString method, of object B are joined by a comma. Just like in this snippet:

<rich:column visible="false" label="function">
  <f:facet name="header">Function</f:facet>
  <h:outputText value="#{fn:join(a.b, ', ')}" />
</rich:column>

Where b is the List of objects of class B. Only problem is jsp1.2 won’t render this:

javax.servlet.ServletException: Cannot convert [] of type class org.hibernate.collection.PersistentBag to class [Ljava.lang.String;

So the question is: is there a nice way of handling this, short of a <c:forEach> to output the list values in a loop?

I’m afraid this is a legacy project using jsp1.2 and seam2.2 and I’m not allowed to upgrade that.

Answer 1

You could create a getter returning a String of your list:

public String getMyListAsString(){
  return org.apache.commons.lang.StringUtils.join(myList, ", ");
}

You can use the getter in EL:

#{myBean.myListAsString}