Problems with Spring's default PropertyEditor search

[Anoop Krishnan]

I am new to Spring.

I want to create a custom PropertyEditor and found the following in Spring documentation

Spring uses the java.beans.PropertyEditorManager to set the search path for property editors that might be needed. The search path also includes sun.bean.editors, which includes PropertyEditor implementations for types such as Font, Color, and most of the primitive types. Note also that the standard JavaBeans infrastructure will automatically discover PropertyEditor classes (without you having to register them explicitly) if they are in the same package as the class they handle, and have the same name as that class, with 'Editor' appended;

I have a class which holds several enums as inner elements

package com.anoop.spring;
 
import java.beans.PropertyEditorSupport;
import java.util.HashMap;
 
public class AllEnums {
 
public enum Country {
 
INDIA("IN"), GERMANY("DE"), USA("US");
 
private String valueAsString;
 
private Country(final String code) {
this.valueAsString = code;
}
 
@Override
public String toString() {
return this.valueAsString;
}
}
 
public class CountryEditor extends PropertyEditorSupport {
 
@Override
public String getAsText() {
return super.getAsText();
}
 
@Override
public void setAsText(String text) throws IllegalArgumentException {
Object value = null;
if(text.equals("IN")) {
value = Country.INDIA;
} else if(text.equals("DE")) {
value = Country.GERMANY;
} else {
value = Country.USA;
}
this.setValue(value);
}
}
 
public enum Currency {
 
RUPEE("INR"), EURO("EUR"), DOLLAR("USD");
 
private String valueAsString;
 
private Currency(final String code) {
this.valueAsString = code;
}
 
@Override
public String toString() {
return this.valueAsString;
}
}
public class CurrencyEditor extends PropertyEditorSupport {
 
@Override
public String getAsText() {
return super.getAsText();
}
 
@Override
public void setAsText(String text) throws IllegalArgumentException {
Object value = null;
if(text.equals("INR")) {
value = Currency.RUPEE;
} else if(text.equals("EUR")) {
value = Currency.EURO;
} else {
value = Currency.DOLLAR;
}
this.setValue(value);
}
}

}

I have 2 enumerated types Enumerated types Country & Curency
the class names are

com.anoop.spring.AllEnums$Country

and

com.anoop.spring.AllEnums$Currency

And correspondingly I have two Property Editors
CountryEditor and CurrencyEditor

com.anoop.spring.AllEnums$CountryEditor

and

com.anoop.spring.AllEnums$CurrencyEditor

Now I have a wrapper bean as given below

package com.anoop.spring;
 
import com.anoop.spring.AllEnums.Country;
import com.anoop.spring.AllEnums.Currency;
 
public class Cash {

private double value;

private Country country;

private Currency currency;

public Cash() {

}
 
public double getValue() {
return value;
}
 
public void setValue(double value) {
this.value = value;
}
 
public Country getCountry() {
return country;
}
 
public void setCountry(Country country) {
this.country = country;
}
 
public Currency getCurrency() {
return currency;
}
 
public void setCurrency(Currency currency) {
this.currency = currency;
}

}
 

Now I have a MultiActionController with a method as given below

public void doPayment(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response,com.anoop.spring.Cash cachBean) throws Exception

The problem is Spring is never using my PropertyEditors for setting the properties country and currency of the bean com.anoop.spring.Cash because of which I get exception with the following query string country=IN¤cy=INR
at the same time country=INDIA¤cy=RUPEE works fine

Could you please tell me what went wrong with my PropertyEditor definitions.

[Christophe Verré]

How did you register your editors within the CustomEditorConfigurer ?

[Anoop Krishnan]

I think this is not needed because The Editor is in the default search path of PropertyManager

My type class is com.anoop.spring.AllEnumClass$Country and its editor is com.anoop.spring.AllEnumClass$CountryEditor by convention it fits to the default search path where PropertyManager looks for the Property Editors.
This is what I found in spring official documentation on PropertyEditors

Spring uses the java.beans.PropertyEditorManager to set the search path for property editors that might be needed. The search path also includes sun.bean.editors, which includes PropertyEditor implementations for types such as Font, Color, and most of the primitive types. Note also that the standard JavaBeans infrastructure will automatically discover PropertyEditor classes (without you having to register them explicitly) if they are in the same package as the class they handle, and have the same name as that class, with 'Editor' appended;

[Anoop Krishnan]

I found the problem .
It is the PropertyEditor as a inner class .
Property Manager is failing to create a new instance of the property editor when it is an inner class (I do not know why !!!)
but when I created a class with the name com.anoop.spring.AllEnums$CountryEditor it worked
[ February 04, 2008: Message edited by: Anoop Krishnan ]

[Christophe Verré]

I think that you're having a plain old Java problem here. With an inner class, you need to instanciate the class which contains the inner class first. You cannot do the following, and Spring neither :

CurrencyEditor editor = new AllEnums.CurrencyEditor();

Spring needs to instanciate AllEnums first, to do something like this :

CurrencyEditor editor = new AllEnums().new CurrencyEditor();

To avoid this, I can think of at least two ways :

Don't make your enums as inner classes ! Put them in separate files.

Make the inner editors static. If they are statis, Spring will be able to access them.