Spring evaluation language (SpEL) not throw exception when accessing invalid key in map

Question

I am new to SpEL and below is a sample workable test that I used for testing.

public static void main(String[] args) {

    Map<String,String> dictMap = new HashMap<>();
    dictMap.put("key", "value");
    Map<String, Object> rootObj = new HashMap<>();
    rootObj.put("d", dictMap);

    ExpressionParser parser = new SpelExpressionParser();
    Expression exp = parser.parseExpression("['d']['wrongkey']");
    String msg = (String) exp.getValue(new StandardEvaluationContext(rootObj), String.class);
    System.out.println(msg);
}

I expected that the expression should throw exception because there is no key named "wrongkey" in dictMap context. However, it print "null".

Is there any setting that I can use to force the expression evaluation throw exception?

Thank you

Answer 1

Not sure why there should be an exception.

Look, do we have an exception in this case?

dictMap.get("wrongkey");

No, because that is how Java works. The SpEL in Spring is fully based on Java nature. So, here it only delegates to the normal Java's Map.get().

To make it throw an exception you should add into the StandardEvaluationContext a MapAccessor. And that one already has desired logic which throws exception when there is no requested key:

Map<?, ?> map = (Map<?, ?>) target;
Object value = map.get(name);
if (value == null && !map.containsKey(name)) {
    throw new MapAccessException(name);
}
return new TypedValue(value);