Expose public field of POJO to FTL in Spring

Question

I can't figure out how to send a POJO to my template in Spring Boot.

Here's my POJO and my controller:

class DebugTest {
    public String field = "Wooowee";
    public String toString() {
        return "testie " + field;
    }
}

@Controller
@RequestMapping("/debug")
public class WebDebugController {

    @RequestMapping(value = "/ftl", method = RequestMethod.GET)
    public ModelAndView ftlTestPage(Model model) {
        DebugTest test = new DebugTest();
        ModelAndView mnv = new ModelAndView("debug");
        mnv.addObject("test", test);
        return mnv;
    }

}

Here's my template:

HERES THE TEST: ${test}$
HERES THE TEST FIELD: ${test.field}$

Here's the output (GET /debug/ftl):

HERES THE TEST: testie Wooowee$
HERES THE TEST FIELD: FreeMarker template error (DEBUG mode; use RETHROW in production!):
The following has evaluated to null or missing:
==> test.field  [in template "debug.ftl" at line 3, column 25]

[Java stack trace]

Answer 1

The class itself (DebugTest) must be public too, as per the JavaBeans Specification. Also, fields by default aren't exposed. Defining getter methods is generally the best (with Lombok maybe), but if you want to go with fields, configure the ObjectWrapper as such. As you are using Spring Boot, I think that will be something like this in your application.properites:

spring.freemarker.settings.objectWrapper=DefaultObjectWrapper(2.3.28, exposeFields = true)