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 &lt; 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 “&lt;“.

Download Source Code

Download It – Spring3-EL-Ternary-Operator-Example.zip (6 KB)
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