Wednesday 24 April 2013

Reflecting on life, the Universe and what the hell is that BeanInfo class doing to my JSF!!!

As my career at my current employers comes to a close I have been revisiting all the Project sources that I have created for the company with an eye to making them suitable for handover to the guy taking them on when I leave.

In one of them I found a nice booby trap that causes an intermittent problem with a JSF based app.
Essentially a specific domain entity was being accused of not having a specific property by Glassfish but not all the time.

I checked, the property is there as it should be. But what the hell is this BeanInfo class doing here?

The BeanInfo class was also for the domain entity that was sometimes being accused of not having a property it actually did have. Armed with my trusty Sherlock Holmes Deerstalker and magnifying glass I had a look at it. Cause for the problem found! The PropertyDescriptor for the offending property was missing: the BeanInfo class was not in synch with the entity class that had since been changed.

But why would this cause JSF to sometimes complain?
Well with Introspection you can obtain information about a class with

    BeanInfo info = Introspector.getBeanInfo( SimpleBean.class );

where the bean info is used to obtain lists of fields, properties etc. What happens when you make the getBeanInfo call? Well the clever stuff under the hood checks in something called SimpleBeanBeanInfo.class exists in the same package as the class parameter. If one does not exist then one is automagically created for you and this is returned.

The inference here is that Mojarra, the Glassfish JSF Implementation, is doing similar things with Introspector as above but


  • Not all the time
    Or has a weird classloader thing going on so that the existing BeanInfo class is not found consistently
  • is picking up the out-of-synch BeanInfo class and causing the clever-under-the-hood stuff to appear broken.
Now before throwing the baby away with the bath water I also hunted around to see if deleting these things would have any inadvertant untoward effects on the rest of the system.

Sadly yes, another developer added a totally unneeded Replication framework for DTOs that was commited to the project repository and not the asylum where it belonged. Because this person is no longer with us it is my job to remove the junk.
Only good thing is no JUnit tests for this were added.... but that was also a bad thing.

1 comment:

  1. very interesting. never new about Introspector.getBeanInfo()

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