How To Pass A Null Value To A Custom Tag Library

Today I found something very interesting.  I wanted to pass a java.math.BigDecimal to a custom JSP Tag Library and format it as a percentage, however if the BigDecimal was null I didn’t want to show it.

Easy, I thought. So I created a class similar to the following…

package name.kayley.blog.taglib;

import javax.servlet.jsp.JspException;
import javax.servlet.jsp.tagext.TagSupport;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.math.BigDecimal;

public class BigDecimalTagSupport extends TagSupport {

    private BigDecimal value;

    public void setValue(BigDecimal value) {
        this.value = value;
    }

    public int doEndTag() throws JspException {
        try {
            if (value != null) {
                pageContext
                        .getOut()
                        .print(formatAsPercentage(value));
            }
        } catch (IOException e) {
            throw new JspException(e);
        }
        return EVAL_PAGE;
    }
// ...
}

However, when I called this taglib with a null value I still got a value of 0.

<mytag:bigDecimal value="${aBigDecimal}" />

The output:
0

After a bit of trial and error I discovered that the JSP tab library framework does a little bit of magic on known classes, such as Strings and Numeric objects. Classes of Numeric types that are null get converted to 0 and Strings get converted into the empty string ""

I discovered that if you change your internal value to an java.lang.Object instead of a java.math.BigDecimal the magic doesn’t know what to do and just passes null to your class.

So the new class looks like the following…

package name.kayley.blog.taglib;

import javax.servlet.jsp.JspException;
import javax.servlet.jsp.tagext.TagSupport;
import java.io.IOException;

public class BigDecimalTagSupport extends TagSupport {

    private Object value;

    public void setValue(Object value) {
        this.value = value;
    }

    public int doEndTag() throws JspException {
        try {
            if (value != null) {
                // Cast value to a BigDecimal 
                // if you need to.
                pageContext
                        .getOut()
                        .print(formatAsPercentage(value));
            }
        } catch (IOException e) {
            throw new JspException(e);
        }
        return EVAL_PAGE;
    }
//...
}

So now when I use the tag and pass a null BigDecimal to it I get the required result of no output.

WIN

I have an example web app demonstrating this, if anyone wants a copy just let me know.

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Pay At The Pump and LPG Finder for BlackBerry(R)

For the past few months on and off I’ve been working on a project for my friend and former colleague John Haselden of Abstractec. He has made a website and an iPhone phone application which utilises web services of the website. The project is called Fuelista, and the applications are Pay at the Pump and iPayAtThePump for iPhone, (with variants for LPG etc).

The idea of the Pay at the Pump and LPG Finder applications is to provide a location based service to allow you to find petrol stations that provide a “pay at the pump” or “LPG” service. The application does a GPS lookup on your location, and returns a list of garages that provide that service. You can then navigate through and get more details of the garage, and if you require you can a route from your current location to the garage.

Abstractec are trying out more platforms than just the iPhone. They are investigating Android, BlackBerry and PalmPre. I was asked if I would like a go at the BlackBerry port, so I thought “why not?”

I wanted to get into writing iPhone applications for fun and maybe a bit of extra cash, I bought myself a Macbook Pro and an iPhone in mid 2009, but there is a lot to learn to get up and running with iPhone development, the applications are written in Objective-C and the development environment is quite difficult to get your head around when you’re starting off, especially coming from a Java background.
BlackBerry applications however are written using Java.

Research In Motion (RIM) provide a layer on top of J2ME providing their own classes and UI components specifically for the BlackBerry handsets.

The application is complete and also I have created the LPG equivalent. Check out the video below for a demo of the application. The GPS lookup on the handset that I have to test with is quite poor…Hence the timeout when the first lookup occurs.

Enjoy…

Update 9th December 2018 – I dug out the code for this little app and it’s available here if anyone is interested.

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How to Avoid ClassCastExceptions when using Hibernate Proxied Objects

Recently at work I was faced with an issue on the live system. A certain page within the application would only show the system’s standard error message. After looking in the logs I discovered there was a ClassCastException being thrown, this was due to the fact that a lazily loaded List of objects retrieved by hibernate contained proxied objects. The entities that were proxied were using a single table inheritance strategy, so there is a base class that is subclassed several times. The entities once loaded were being sorted into separate lists that are typed according to the subclasses, they were being cast into the appropriate subclass but this cast was failing because instead of being an instance of say Animal it was an instance of Animal$$EnhancerByCGLIB$$10db1483 i.e. A Hibernate Proxy. Let me show you an example.

So lets say we have a base class that has an inheritance strategy set…

package name.kayley.cglibexample;

import javax.persistence.*;

@Entity
@Table(name="animals")
@Inheritance(strategy=InheritanceType.SINGLE_TABLE)
@DiscriminatorColumn(
    name="animal_type_id",
    discriminatorType=DiscriminatorType.INTEGER
)
public class Animal {

    @Id
    @GeneratedValue
    private Long id;
    
    @Column
    private String name;
    
    @Column
    private Integer age;
    
    public Long getId() {
        return id;
    }

    public void setId(Long id) {
        this.id = id;
    }

    public String getName() {
        return name;
    }

    public void setName(String name) {
        this.name = name;
    }

    public Integer getAge() {
        return age;
    }

    public void setAge(Integer age) {
        this.age = age;
    }
}

And then we had 2 subclasses of this Animal class, lets say, Cat and Dog


package name.kayley.cglibexample;

import javax.persistence.DiscriminatorValue;
import javax.persistence.Entity;

@Entity
@DiscriminatorValue("1")
public class Cat extends Animal {
   // some cat specific attributes
}


package name.kayley.cglibexample;

import javax.persistence.DiscriminatorValue;
import javax.persistence.Entity;

@Entity
@DiscriminatorValue("2")
public class Dog extends Animal {
   // some dog specific attributes
}

As you can see the discriminator column is animal_type_id, which I have defined 2 to be Dog and 1 to be Cat. So now we should make sure we have some data in a database table called animals…

SELECT id,animal_type_id,name,age FROM animals a LIMIT 0,1000

'id', 'animal_type_id', 'name', 'age'
1, 2, 'Scooby', 3
2, 1, 'Felix', 4
3, 1, 'Garfield', 4

Right so to recreate a similar situation I will show you a unit test that will pass! What I am trying to do is to retrieve the list of animals and sort them in the java into separate lists, a list of dogs and a list of cats..

public void testCGLibInstanceOfError() throws Exception {

    List dogs = new ArrayList();
    List cats = new ArrayList();

    Iterator it = hibernateDao.createQuery("from Animal").iterate();

    while (it.hasNext()) {

        Animal animal = it.next();
        assertTrue(animal.getClass().getName().contains("Animal$$EnhancerByCGLIB$$"));
                    
        if (animal instanceof Cat) {
            cats.add((Cat) animal);
        } 
        else if (animal instanceof Dog) {
            dogs.add((Dog) animal);
        }
    }
    assertEquals(0, dogs.size());
    assertEquals(0, cats.size());
}

Now using the data in the database we want a list of 1 dog and a list of 2 cats. Here I’m being particularly evil and using instanceof to differentiate these. The assertEquals at the end of the test pass, even though the code looks like it should be adding items to these lists based on what is in the database. This is because animal is not an instanceof Cat or Dog but an instanceof Animal$$EnhancerByCGLIB$$10db1483.

So how do we solve this issue?

I first thought about using Hibernate.initialize(animal); which will force the animal class to become the actual object, not the proxy. I felt this approach to be dirty and it is really polluting code that shouldn’t really know anything about hibernate.

So I did some googling and after reading the hibernate documentation and then this I set about using the Gang Of Four Visitor Pattern.

First we need a visitor interface that we can implement in your test…

package name.kayley.cglibexample;

public interface AnimalEntityVisitor {
    void visit(Dog dog);
    void visit(Cat cat);
}

Next we need is an interface for our Animal class to implement…

package name.kayley.cglibexample;

public interface AnimalEntity {
    void accept(AnimalEntityVisitor visitor);
}

Now we make our Animal class I showed earlier implement the AnimalEntity


package name.kayley.cglibexample;

import javax.persistence.*;

@Entity
@Table(name="animals")
@Inheritance(strategy=InheritanceType.SINGLE_TABLE)
@DiscriminatorColumn(
    name="animal_type_id",
    discriminatorType=DiscriminatorType.INTEGER
)
public abstract class Animal implements AnimalEntity {
   ...
   // see top of post
   ...
}

And next implement the method in the subclasses..


package name.kayley.cglibexample;

import javax.persistence.DiscriminatorValue;
import javax.persistence.Entity;

@Entity
@DiscriminatorValue("1")
public class Cat extends Animal {
   // some cat specific attributes

   public void accept(AnimalEntityVisitor visitor) {
      visitor.visit(this);
   }
}


package name.kayley.cglibexample;

import javax.persistence.DiscriminatorValue;
import javax.persistence.Entity;

@Entity
@DiscriminatorValue("2")
public class Dog extends Animal {
   // some dog specific attributes

   public void accept(AnimalEntityVisitor visitor) {
      visitor.visit(this);
   }
}

All we need to do is implement the visitor in our test…


public class MyTest 
    extends AbstractTransactionalDataSourceSpringContextTests 
    implements AnimalEntityVisitor {

        ...
    // some spring setup     
        ...

    private List dogs = new ArrayList();
    private List cats = new ArrayList();
    
    public void testCGLibUsingVisitor() throws Exception {

        Iterator it = hibernateDao.createQuery("from Animal").iterate();

        while (it.hasNext()) {

            Animal animal = it.next();

            assertTrue(animal.getClass().getName().contains("Animal$$EnhancerByCGLIB$$"));

            animal.accept(this);
            
        }
        assertEquals(1, dogs.size());
        assertEquals(2, cats.size());
    }

    public void visit(Dog dog) {
        dogs.add(dog);
    }

    public void visit(Cat cat) {
        cats.add(cat);
    }
}

So instead of using instanceof or having to cast anything (which is what was happening in the live code I talked about) which can cause weird side effects and ClassCastExceptions, you can just use this visitor pattern. What happens is the test is implementing the AnimalEntityVisitor, so when animal.accept(this); is called, it calls the appropriate visit method on “this”. In our case the visit method is just adding the object to a list. So I’ve updated the assertEquals calls to be what I now expect and the test passes.
Happy days, enjoy!
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How to Undelete files removed with “rm” in Ubuntu

Recently I found myself in a situation where I needed to recover some files I accidentally deleted. I had written a program in Java to read off a JBoss Messaging Dead Letter Queue, and save them in a format that could be re-inputted back into the system.

So my program was writing files into a directory within my home directory, and while I was testing the program I was not committing back to JMS so ensure the messages stayed there. When I was confident that the program was correct, I added the commit, I then removed the files that my tests had produce by using “rm *”.

I then ran my program for real. In the directory I was expecting files to appear I typed the usual “ls -ltr” to see a list of files. I pressed the up key to run the last command i.e. “ls -ltr” to see some more files created. I repeated this a few times, until I accidentally pressed the up key twice…..yep you guessed it….”rm *”, the files were deleted and the commit to JMS means they were no longer on the queue. My heart sank.

Now I rememebered on the old days of DOS there was an UNDELETE command, so I was looking around the web to see if there was something similar for Linux. I was in luck, especially as my program was still running.

Basically thanks to this information, I recovered my deleted files with relative ease. 🙂

Ok so to do this, I believe you need to be as fortunate as I was and still have the program that created the deleted files still running, so let’s create a Java program that will write to a file and then keep running…


package name.kayley.undeletefiletest;

import java.io.FileWriter;
import java.io.PrintWriter;

public class UndeleteFileTest {
 public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {  
  FileWriter writer = new FileWriter("/tmp/testFile.txt");
  
  PrintWriter printer = new PrintWriter(writer);
  
  printer.append("hello this file is going to be deleted.");
  printer.flush();
  Object lock = new Object();
  
  synchronized(lock) {
   lock.wait();
  }
 }
}

Ok, now run that program and it will create a file in /tmp called testFile.txt, so lets see it..


andy@andy-laptop:/tmp$ ls -ltr *.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 andy andy 39 2009-02-13 18:54 testFile.txt

So we can see the file is there, lets delete it to see if we can recover it…

andy@andy-laptop:/tmp$ rm testFile.txt

Now the file is gone. So how do we get it back? Well first we need to find the PID of the process that created the file that was deleted. We know that it was a java program that created it so we’ll use the lsof and search for java..

andy@andy-laptop:/tmp$ lsof | grep java
.....[lots of things listed]
java      9048       andy    4r      REG        8,1       39 1622029 /tmp/testFile.txt (deleted)

No now we know the PID is 9048 lets find the file… so there should be a directory /proc/[PID]/fd…


andy@andy-laptop:/tmp$ cd /proc/9048/fd
andy@andy-laptop:/proc/9048/fd$ ls -ltr
total 0
lr-x------ 1 andy andy 64 2009-02-13 18:54 4 -> /tmp/testFile.txt (deleted)
l-wx------ 1 andy andy 64 2009-02-13 18:54 3 -> /usr/local/jdk1.6.0_07/jre/lib/rt.jar
l-wx------ 1 andy andy 64 2009-02-13 18:54 2 -> pipe:[43665]
l-wx------ 1 andy andy 64 2009-02-13 18:54 1 -> pipe:[43664]
lr-x------ 1 andy andy 64 2009-02-13 18:54 0 -> pipe:[43663]

Bingo! We have found the deleted file, so now all we need to do is cat the link to a new file, so here I put it into my home directory…


andy@andy-laptop:/proc/9048/fd$ cat 4 > ~/testFile.txt

Next, I go to my home folder and have a look at the file, and hey presto…its restored…


andy@andy-laptop:/proc/9048/fd$ cd
andy@andy-laptop:~$ less testFile.txt 
hello this file is going to be deleted.
testFile.txt (END) 

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How to Print Out Bind Variables in Java Prepared Statements.

Ever been frustrated by the fact that when you use (as you should do!) bind variables within a java prepared statement you cannot see the actual values that get put into those bind variables? I know I have. For example if you had a class that had some JDBC calls that did the following….

Class.forName("com.mysql.jdbc.Driver");

connection = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:mysql://localhost/message_board", "root", "");

statement = connection.prepareStatement("select * from messages where id = ?");
statement.setLong(1,1L);

resultSet = statement.executeQuery();

There is no nice out the box way to find out what the ?’s will be resolved to. I’ve always wanted a method on PreparedStatement that would address this, but alas there still is none. Traditionally I would have done something like the following…


long id = 1L;
String sql = "select * from messages where id = ?"
logger.info(sql + "; ?1=" + id);

statement = connection.prepareStatement(sql);
statement.setLong(1,id);

Or write your own convoluted method for replacing each ? with the value which is prone to bugs and not being database agnostic.

When using an old jdbc based in-house framework this really wasn’t an issue for me, as we had such a method that was prone to bugs but for the most part it worked ok. Since then the work I have been doing has been much more hibernate based. This is where the issue came for me, you can turn on sql logging either by configuring your favourite logging framework to do so, or by turning on the hibernate.show_sql property, which will give you the following output…


select message0_.id as id2_, message0_.email_address as email2_2_, message0_.inserted_at as inserted3_2_, message0_.remote_host as remote4_2_, message0_.text as text2_ from messages message0_ where message0_.id=?

This sql was generated from the following hql

from Message where id = ?

Now apart from this sql being particularly hideous to look at, the question mark is still there, we have no way of possibly knowing what those bind variables were without printing them out at the time the hql is executed.

Enter p6spy.

I did a bit of googling about and found other people had the same issue. And there is an answer to this problem, and its called p6spy. P6spy is a jdbc driver that is a proxy for your real driver. I’ve only just started to use it, I believe it is capable of many cool things, but the one that I am interested in allows you to print out sql from prepared statements with – yep, you guessed it – the bind variables substituted for the real values.

You can download it from http://www.p6spy.com, it must be fairly stable as the last release was in 2003 (I’m so annoyed that I didn’t know about this earlier). There seems to be a little problem with their website as when you click download you get an error while trying to fill in or ignore their survey. Don’t panic, once you’ve ignored the survey go back to the main page and click download again and the files will be there waiting for you to download.

So how do we configure this little beauty? Well the download is p6spy-install.zip, unzip this somewhere safe (and keep in mind that all the files are in the root of the zip file, so you might want to create a directory to unzip it to first). The files we’re interested in are p6spy.jar and spy.properties. Copy the jar file into the lib folder of your project and copy the spy.properties file into somewhere that will be on the classpath.

If you look inside spy.properties you will see that it’s really very well documented and tells you all you really need to know on how to configure it. Although one thing to note in there is that they have said that the real driver you configure in your application should be set to com.p6spy.engine.P6SpyDriver which is actually incorrect, it should be com.p6spy.engine.spy.P6SpyDriver, the first one doesn’t exist and you will get a ClassNotFoundException.

So what I did… In my spy.properties I set the realdriver…

# mysql Connector/J driver
realdriver=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver

(note by default the open source mysql driver is uncommented which was a gotcha for me at first, so I commented it out, and uncommented the above)

Next I altered my code in the first example to the following…

Class.forName("com.p6spy.engine.spy.P6SpyDriver");

connection = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:mysql://localhost/message_board", "root", "");

statement = connection.prepareStatement("select * from messages where id = ?");
statement.setLong(1,1L);

resultSet = statement.executeQuery();

And lo and behold in the root of my eclipse project on the file system a file called spy.log has appeared. and in it the following…

1217374504582|6|0|statement|select * from messages where id = ?|select * from messages where id = 1
1217374504595|-1||resultset|select * from messages where id = 1|email_address = myemail@nospam.com, id = 1, inserted_at = 2008-07-29 00:00:00.0, remote_host = localhost, text = Thank you for showing me the wonders of p6spy

There is lots of other stuff in the log file as well but as you can see its very handy, as it shows you the statement with question marks and with the real values substituted, and also shows you the results set which is passed back 🙂 Beautiful lol.

And the hql of

from Message where id = ?

is output as:


1217374913350|5|2|statement|select message0_.id as id2_, message0_.email_address as email2_2_, message0_.inserted_at as inserted3_2_, message0_.remote_host as remote4_2_, message0_.text as text2_ from messages message0_ where message0_.id=?|select message0_.id as id2_, message0_.email_address as email2_2_, message0_.inserted_at as inserted3_2_, message0_.remote_host as remote4_2_, message0_.text as text2_ from messages message0_ where message0_.id=1
1217374913369|-1||resultset|select message0_.id as id2_, message0_.email_address as email2_2_, message0_.inserted_at as inserted3_2_, message0_.remote_host as remote4_2_, message0_.text as text2_ from messages message0_ where message0_.id=1|email2_2_ = myemail@nospam.com, remote4_2_ = localhost

Still ugly but at least I can now see what the bind variables are going to be 🙂

You can also configure it so it comes out in your normal logging file, the spy.properties file details how you do that.

Oh how I wish I’d have known this 4 years ago.

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How to configure Tomcat 5.0.x to use Java Logging

If you are using java logging and a version of tomcat previous to tomcat 5.5, you have to use the deprecated Logger declarations in your server.xml or
context.xml files. The are deprecated in tomcat 5.0 and have actually been removed in tomcat 5.5.

This is used to achieve separate log files for separate virtual hosts/web applications for example in your server xml you may have…

<Host name="myapp.mydomain.com" debug="0" appBase="webapps/myapp"<br />
      unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true"<br />
      xmlValidation="false" xmlNamespaceAware="false">
      <Logger className="org.apache.catalina.logger.FileLogger"<br />
              directory="logs"  prefix="myapp." suffix=".log"<br />
              timestamp="true"/>

This will log the myapp.timestamp.log file with all the contents of the webapp “myapp”.

If you are using log4j you can simply omit this and use the log4j.properties (or log4j.xml file) within your webapp to specify what the logging levels are and where
to log to etc.

Java logging lacks this functionality. The java logging configuration file logging.properies is a jvm-wide properties file, and therefore traditionally
you would have to use the Logger feature to get separate log file per webapp.

In tomcat 5.5 apache introduced juli which is an implementation of the java logger that addresses the shortcomings of the logging.properties file.
i.e. with tomcat 5.5 and above you can have a logging.properties file within your webapp.

Now if you are tied to tomcat 5.0 for your deploys you can actually add juli logging to tomcat 5.0 quite easily, here’s what you do…

Firstly download the tomcat 5.5 core binary distribution. (from http://tomcat.apache.org/download-55.cgi)
From this apache-tomcat-5.5.25.zip file extract the following two files…

apache-tomcat-5.5.25/bin/tomcat-juli.jar into jakarta-tomcat-5.0.28/bin
and
apache-tomcat-5.5.25/conf/logging.properties into jakarta-tomcat-5.0.28/conf

Next we need to edit our catalina startup script to tell java logging about the juli logging jar and properties file.

if you are using a flavour of linux/unix edit jakarta-tomcat-5.0.28/bin/catalina.sh

and under the cygwin section add the following…


# Set juli LogManager if it is present
if [ -r "$CATALINA_BASE"/conf/logging.properties ]; then
 JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS "-Djava.util.logging.manager=org.apache.juli.ClassLoaderLogManager" "-Djava.util.logging.config.file="$CATALINA_BASE/conf/logging.properties"
fi

and then after the classpath section add…


if [ -r "$CATALINA_HOME"/bin/tomcat-juli.jar ]; then
 CLASSPATH="$CLASSPATH":"$CATALINA_HOME"/bin/tomcat-juli.jar
fi

if you are using windows edit jakarta-tomcat-5.0.28/bin/catalina.bat

After the setenv.bat section add…


if not exist "%CATALINA_BASE%conflogging.properties" goto noJuliProps
set JAVA_OPTS=%JAVA_OPTS% -Djava.util.logging.manager=org.apache.juli.ClassLoaderLogManager -Djava.util.logging.config.file="%CATALINA_BASE%conflogging.properties"
:noJuliProps

and then after the classpath section add…


if not exist "%CATALINA_HOME%bintomcat-juli.jar" goto noJuli
set CLASSPATH=%CLASSPATH%;%CATALINA_HOME%bintomcat-juli.jar
:noJuli

And voila that’s it!

All you need now in your webapp is add your own specific logging.properties file to the WEB-INF/classes directory of the war, an example of which….


####### --------- logging.properties --------- #############
handlers = org.apache.juli.FileHandler, java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler

############################################################
# Handler specific properties.
# Describes specific configuration info for Handlers.
############################################################

org.apache.juli.FileHandler.level=FINEST
org.apache.juli.FileHandler.directory=/var/log/tomcat
org.apache.juli.FileHandler.prefix=myapp.

java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler.level=FINEST
java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler.formatter=java.util.logging.SimpleFormatter

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