I have a scoped variable called 'USER' with a variety of the usual bean style
properties. Naturally, it's just a convenient place to hold the user properties and
in the EL, it's quite easy to get them ${USER.full_name}. However, if I want to
predicate an XPath query (in an x: tag select statement) on information in the USER
object, I don't think I can do that. The spec doesn't mention it and Mr. Bayern's
book is not available on Safari. "Core JSTL" also makes no comment here.
A brief look at the 1.1 JSTL spec didn't turn anything up either. Now I can easily
get around the problem, but it would be immensely more powerful if we could embed the
EL in our XPath statements. It shouldn't bee too hard to parse, with ${ } surrounding
the EL's inside the XPath as XPath does not define any of those three characters. The
only obvious issue would be escaped "${" in predicate text.
I certainly understand if this was intentionally left out, but the fact that we cannot
really even dynamically replace select statements with EL, combined with no bean style
property access, seems to leave a large functionality gap.
Or am I just whining? :-)
Rick
