Recently we were disputing (Arthur vs Vladimir) about the benefits of ValueExpression references in JSF/Facelets.

Such dispute in itself presents rather funny picture when you're defending one position and after a while you're taking opposite point and starting to maintain it. But let's go to the problem.

JSF/Facelets uses Unified Expression Language for the data binding, e.g.:

<h:inputText id="name" value="#{customer.name}" />

or

<h:selectBooleanCheckbox id="selected" value="#{customer.selected}" />

In these cases value from input and check boxes are mapped to a properties name, and selected of a bean named customer. Everything is fine except of a case when selected is not of boolean type (e.g. int). In this case you will have a hard time thinking on how to adapt bean property to the jsf component. Basically, you have to provide a bean adapter, or change type of property. Later is unfeasible in our case, thus we're choosing bean adapter. More than that we have to create a generic solution for int to boolean property type adapter. With this target in mind we may create a function receiving bean and a property name and returning other bean with a single propery of boolean type:

<h:selectBooleanCheckbox id="selected"
  value="#{ex:toBoolean(customer, 'selected').value}" />

But thinking further the question appears: whether we can pass ValueExpression by reference into a bean adapter function, and have something like this:

<h:selectBooleanCheckbox id="selected"
  value="#{ex:toBoolean(byref customer.selected).value}" />

It turns out that it's possible to do this kind of thing. Unfortunately it requires custom facelets tag, like this:

<ex:ref var="selected" value="#{customer.selected}"/>

<h:selectBooleanCheckbox id="selected"
  value="#{ex:toBoolean(selected).value}" />

Implementation of such a tag is really primitive (in fact it mimics c:set tag handler except one line), but still it's an extension on the level we don't happy to introduce.

This way we were going circles considering pros and cons, regretting that el references ain't native in jsf/facelets and weren't able to classify whether our solution is a hack or a neat extension...

P.S. We know that JSF 2.0 provides solution for h:selectBooleanCheckbox but still there are cases when similar technique is required even there.