Today, Matthias Naber made me aware of IntelliJ type hints in JSF and JSP files.
IntelliJ does quite a good job in figuring out the types of EL variables itself, providing code completion and usage information. But there are situations where IDEA is unable determine the type of an EL variable. This usually occurs to me in a facelet composition where the variables are passed in as a param.
The following is a basic facelt composition invocation:
<ui:include src="toiletten.xhtml">
<ui:param name="toilette" value="#{umkleide.toiletten}"/>
</ui:include>In the file containing the invocation, IDEA is fully aware of the type of the EL variables. However in the included file (toiletten.xhtml), which might look something like this:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"
xmlns:ui="http://java.sun.com/jsf/facelets">
<ui:composition>
<h:outputLabel value="#{toilette.ppBecken}"/>
</ui:composition>
</html>IntelliJ is unable to infere the type of the EL variable toilette. It is therefore neither able to offer me code completion nor warn me about typos and errors. It might even mark the getter getPpBecken() in the Toilette as unused.
However, if you help IDEA a little bit by hinting the type, all the goodness is restored. Just add the following, proprietary comment somewhere in the file:
<!--@elvariable id="toilette" type="com.notadomain.datamodel.Toiletten"-->This comment tells IntelliJ the type of the EL variable, enabling autocompletion, usage indexing and of course only marking true errors in the file.
If you are using JSPs, the comment should probably look something like:
<%--@elvariable id="toilette" type="com.notadomain.datamodel.Toiletten"--%>If you are somehow worried about putting proprietary comments in your files, you have some weird issues. But nonetheless, those comments, at least in facelets, even work outside of the composition-tag, which will make them become ignored anyway.
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"
xmlns:ui="http://java.sun.com/jsf/facelets">
<!--@elvariable id="toilette" type="com.notadomain.datamodel.Toiletten"-->
<ui:composition>
<h:outputLabel value="#{toilette.ppBecken}"/>
</ui:composition>
</html>A properly configured IntelliJ setup will help you so many times a day. You are going to be a lot more productive. It is absolutely worth, adding some comments and guides to make the warnings and analyzations of your IDE more precise and focussed.
If I had gotten a coin for every time, I fixed a bug, that was already underlined and critized by IDEA when I found it, I’d have an aweful lot of coins.
Use your tools to their full advance and don’t check in code that contains warnings! I really wish, there would be something like the -Werror flag in javac!