How to nest static method invocations in Spring Expression Language in a Spring config file?

Question

I want to inject a guava Predicate into my bean, which should be an equalto inside a not.

I tried this:

<bean id="bla" class="something">
    <property name="indexPredicate" value="#{T(com.google.common.base.Predicates).not(T(com.google.common.base.Predicates).equalTo(145028) )}" />
</bean>

But it throws exception:

Caused by: org.springframework.expression.spel.SpelParseException: EL1049E:(pos 36): Unexpected data after '.': 'not(!)'

Spring 3.0.5, Guava 11.0.2

How can I make it work?

Answer 1

Apparently SpEL thinks you mean the Operator not. However, I don't see any way to escape or disambiguate that in the documentation. Perhaps you need to file a feature request for that.

Alternatively, here is the pre-3.0 factory-method approach. It's horrible, I know, but it might be an acceptable workaround in your case:

<property name="indexPredicate">
    <bean class="com.google.common.base.Predicates" factory-method="not">
        <constructor-arg>
            <bean class="com.google.common.base.Predicates"
                  factory-method="equalTo">
                <constructor-arg>
                    <bean class="java.lang.Integer" factory-method="valueOf">
                        <constructor-arg value="145028" />
                    </bean>
                </constructor-arg>
            </bean>
        </constructor-arg>
    </bean>
</property>