form:select disabled attribute

[theTav]

I've been playing around with the spring form taglib lately and came across a fairly disturbing phenomenon.

<form:select path="whatever" disabled="${true}">
Will render a select element that is NOT disabled

<form:select path="whatever" disabled="${'true'}">
Will render a select element that IS disabled.

This indicates to me that the tag expects a string in that attribute and is refusing to coerce any boolean values (possibly checking the type first).

The impact is that I'm unable to do something like <form:select path="whatever" disabled="${someOtherfield.selectedId != -1}" /> which is something that happens fairly often in our system.

Am I simply missing some part of the form taglibs functionality? Is this a legitimate design decision? A defect?

[theTav]

Ok, I'm pretty sure this one is a defect...

AbstractHtmlInputElementTag.isDisabled has the single line:

return "true".equals(evaluate("disabled", getDisabled()));

evaluate returns an object, in this case Boolean.TRUE

String.equals will compare types, and return false, the Boolean isn't automagically converted to a string because String.equals takes an Object parameter.

A suggested fix would be:

return "true".equals(evaluate("disabled", getDisabled()).toString());

however that doesn't handle cases where evaluate returns null, so there is probably a better solution...

So where do I go from here? I guess I need to find Spring's bug tracking mechanism, see if this is already raised, and if it's not then raise it with a suggested fix?

This'll be a new process for me so any advice/pointers/links would be appreciated and hopefully stop me from raising items in the wrong system etc and wasting peoples time.

[theTav]

Raised http://jira.springframework.org/browse/SPR-6790