Dear Cocooners,
today, after having upgraded our Cocoon build to the latest revision from trunk, we started getting NPEs from a project that had worked perfectly until then. Turns out the NPE was caused in a subsitemap while trying to use the global input module to reference the value of a global variable that was defined in the same subsitemap.
I started looking for differences between our app and the Cocoon samples, where the global input module seems to work fine, and I concluded that the only difference was the the samples' top sitemap had a
<map:component-configurations> <global-variables/> <map:component-configurations>
section, whereas our toplevel sitemap did not. So I added an empty <global-variables> element to ours too and the NPE went away!
So, apparently, you MUST put a <global-variables> element in the toplevel sitemap in order to declare global variables in a subsitemap. Is this a bug or is this intended behaviour?
This is a bug!
Carsten