Question

Java:

public class MyBean {
  ...
  public Handler getHandler(){  
    return new Handler(){  
      public void handle(ActionEvent e){...}  
    }
  }
  ...
}

public interface Handler{
  void handle(ActionEvent e);
}

xhtml:

<h:commandButton ... actionListener="#{myBean.handler.handle}"/>

I’m in a tomcat 6.0 environment. This is a common pattern in java, but it seems not to work with EL method bindings. I get an exception:

javax.faces.event.MethodExpressionActionListener processAction SEVERE): Received 'java.lang.IllegalAccessException' when invoking action listener '#{myBean.handler.handle}' for component 'j_id115'
javax.faces.event.MethodExpressionActionListener processAction SEVERE): java.lang.IllegalAccessException: Class org.apache.el.parser.AstValue can not access a member of class MyBean$1 with modifiers "public"
...

Answer 1

This was more subtle than I thought…

From java, there is no problem calling the public method in the inner class:

MyBean myBean = getMyBean();
Handler handler = myBean.getHandler();
handler.handle(event); // OK

Using reflection, it depends on how it’s done. The method can be invoked as declared (1):

Method getHandlerMethod = MyBean.class.getMethod("getHandler");
Method handleMethod = getHandlerMethod.getReturnType().getMethod("handle", ActionEvent.class);
handleMethod.invoke(handler, event); // OK, invoking declared method works

Or it can be invoked as defined in the inner class (2):

Method handleMethod = handler.getClass().getMethod("handle", ActionEvent.class);
handleMethod.invoke(handler, event) // throws IllegalAccessException

Obviously, there’s a third option, and it works (3):

Method handleMethod = handler.getClass().getDeclaredMethod("handle", ActionEvent.class);
handleMethod.invoke(handler, event) // OK

Unfortunately, my JSF environment (Tomcat 6.0 with JSF mojarra 1.2 and icefaces 1.8.2) implements approach (2) instead of (3) and therefore my example doesn’t work.