substring in El Expression

[aditya.bora]

Hi to all

I am creating a datatable whigh shows data related to a department table. In database, department table has got a field called depdesc(size:256) which stores description of the department. Now, when I enter department description of size 256 without any space, data column is not able to maintain the defined width of the column. It gets expand.
To overcome this issue what I am thinking of displaying only the first 40 characters form the description field. Now my question is, Is this possible to use substring in El Expression for data column?
Something like:

<rich:column id="dep3" sortable="true" label="Description" filterEvent="onkeyup" style="width:150px;" sortBy="#{ecEntity.depDesc}" filterBy="#{ecEntity.depDesc}">

  <f:facet id="dep3_ecfchdr" name="header">
   <span id="dep3_echdrtxt" style="width:150px;">Description</span>
  </f:facet>

  <h:outputText value="#{substring(ecEntity.depDesc,0,40)}"/>
</rich:column>


Thankx in advance
Aditya(Eddie)

[niox.nikospara.yahoo.com]

Hi,

You need to define a new EL function, easy with facelets.

1) Create a file eg my.taglib.xml (replace my, but keep the .taglib.xml suffix) in WEB-INF with contents:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE facelet-taglib PUBLIC
     "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD Facelet Taglib 1.0//EN"
     "https://facelets.dev.java.net/source/browse/*checkout*/facelets/src/etc/facelet-taglib_1_0.dtd"
>
<facelet-taglib>
     <namespace>http://www.my.net/some/arbitrary/namespace</namespace>
     
     <function>
          <function-name>substring</function-name>
          <function-class>my.util.Util</function-class>
          <function-signature>java.lang.String substring(java.lang.String,int,int)</function-signature>
     </function>
</facelet-taglib>

2) Create the class as follows:

package my.util;

public class Util {
  public static String substring(String orig, int start, int length) {
    return orig.substring(start,length);
  }
}

3) Finally make Facelets aware of your library; in web.xml:

     <context-param>
          <param-name>facelets.LIBRARIES</param-name>
          <param-value>/WEB-INF/my.taglib.xml</param-value>
     </context-param>

4) Use it in your pages:

<ui:composition ... xmlns:my="http://www.my.net/some/arbitrary/namespace">
  ...
  <h:outputText value="#{my:substring(ecEntity.depDesc,0,40)}"/>
  ...
</ui:composition>

[aditya.bora]

Thankx Nikos. It really works.

Regards
Aditya(Eddie)