I do not recommend coding anything but the simplest expressions in EL. EL is a
to debug, and it risks violating the Separation of Concerns contract of MVC.
Also, specifically, it appears that the way character literal comparisons are done varies depending on server implementations. In some, user. hrRequest == ‘B’ will be done as a straight character-to-character conversion. In others, one or both operands will be promoted to "int" values.
So I prefer the more abstract (and safer) version:
Paired, of course, with an "isRequestB()" read-only property accessor methond on the "user" bean.
Although your biggest problem seems to be that I cannot find any controls whose ID is "certificates" in your sample. Only a "hrcertificates".
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.