Web Flows: Auto-complete in <evaluate expression="..."/>?

[odoepner.cgi]

I am using STS 2.3.0.RELEASE.

I am looking at the swf-booking-faces sample project that is part of the SWF distribution.

I get "Content Assist not available at the current location" when I open a flow xml file in the "Spring Web Flow XML Editor" (for example "booking-flow.xml"), edit the "expression" attribute of an "evaluate" tag and try CTRL+SPACE for content-assist.

Is this the expected behavior? It would be a major limitation (compared to the usual editing of Java code).

[Christian Dupuis]

odoepner.cgi,

Is this the expected behavior? It would be a major limitation (compared to the usual editing of Java code).

Yes, in a way this is expected. STS does currently not have any support for editing or validating SpEL expressions.

Due to the very dynamic nature of the expression language this is not very easy to do. But we are still planning to add this to STS in one of the future releases.

For your reference here the appropriate JIRA:

STS-169: As a user, I want to get validation for Spring EL expressions
https://issuetracker.springsource.com/browse/STS-169

STS-168: As a user, I want to get code completion of Spring EL expressions
https://issuetracker.springsource.com/browse/STS-168

Christian

[odoepner.cgi]

Hi Christian,

Thanks for the qualified response. I hope this issue is somewhere not too low on you guys' list of priorities.

I find it quite problematic that with Spring come so many expressions and references (bean ids) that are effectively just Strings. It gets in the way when you do a lot of Refactoring and want to rely on IDE support and compile-time errors rather than debug runtime errors.

By the way: IntelliJ IDEA seems to have some support for those expressions:
http://blogs.jetbrains.com/idea/2009...tellij-idea-8/

Thanks
Oliver

[odoepner.cgi]

Another thing to remember:

Apparently the Spring IDE plugins could introduce support for Spring EL expressions by using the Eclipse WST content assist integration points.

Please see http://community.jboss.org/wiki/Code...SPXHTMLEditors for some background on how the JBoss Tools (and in particular their XHTML / Facelets editor) support this.