Spring EL ternary operator (if-then-else) example
Spring EL supports ternary operator , perform “if then else” conditional checking. For example,
condition ? true : false
Spring EL in Annotation
Spring EL ternary operator with @Value annotation. In this example, if “itemBean.qtyOnHand” is less than 100, then set “customerBean.warning” to true, else set it to false.
package com.mkyong.core;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Value;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Component;
@Component("customerBean")
public class Customer {
@Value("#{itemBean.qtyOnHand < 100 ? true : false}")
private boolean warning;
public boolean isWarning() {
return warning;
}
public void setWarning(boolean warning) {
this.warning = warning;
}
@Override
public String toString() {
return "Customer [warning=" + warning + "]";
}
}
package com.mkyong.core;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Value;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Component;
@Component("itemBean")
public class Item {
@Value("99")
private int qtyOnHand;
public int getQtyOnHand() {
return qtyOnHand;
}
public void setQtyOnHand(int qtyOnHand) {
this.qtyOnHand = qtyOnHand;
}
}
Output
Customer [warning=true]
Spring EL in XML
See equivalent version in bean definition XML file.
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd">
<bean id="customerBean" class="com.mkyong.core.Customer">
<property name="warning"
value="#{itemBean.qtyOnHand < 100 ? true : false}" />
</bean>
<bean id="itemBean" class="com.mkyong.core.Item">
<property name="qtyOnHand" value="99" />
</bean>
</beans>
Output
Customer [warning=true]
In XML, you need to replace less than operator “<” with “<“.
Download Source Code
Download It – Spring3-EL-Ternary-Operator-Example.zip (6 KB)
Hi mkyong, how to implement expression resulting in another expression ? E.g a Candidate bean , if candidate.age > 26 then candidate.eligibilty = true else candidate.selectionalert = 2 . It would great if you can suggest other expression parsers like MVEL if SpEL isn’t suitable
Thanks your website is very helpful.
My code wasn’t working bcos I had no space around the ‘:’. Your example helped identify the problem.
FYI-
is not working .
@Mkyong can you explain me how we can use < operator here instead of < .??
In XML, you need to replace less than operator ‘<' with '<'.
Did you mean 'lt'?
xml doesnt suport the < operator so we use < instead of that.. it is explained here
https://mkyong.com/spring3/spring-el-operators-example/