Jasper complains when parsing valid TLD (was: Can't deploy Custom Tag Library ... )

["Mark R. Diggory" <md...@latte.harvard.edu>]

Jean-Francois Arcand wrote:

> Well, after reading all you mail/exchange (look at my 
> email-address....Craig have the same ;-) ), you should take time to 
> think/re-read your stuff before sending that type of email. I know 
> it's frustrating, but ..... 

Point well taken, I apoligize if anyone found it irritating. I know I 
can be overbearing sometimes with my opinion. ;-)  But I'll still argue 
that Sun made some bad decisions in packaging all this "stuff" into j2sdk.

> Anyway, back to real work! I have a feeling that you tld file is maybe 
> not xml compliant or you are facing a bug that I have fixed with 
> Xerces in Tomcat:
>
> But IMBW..I'm sure it's something like that. Maybe Forte4J (made by 
> SUN ;-) ) is doing something under the hood......also, try with Xerces 
> 2.1. I know, Crimson has the same problem, but maybe there is a bug in 
> both version. Anyway, I'm probably not the best person for that 
> problem, but try to post you problem on the xerces-j mailling list 
> (xml.apache.org). Maybe you will have sometings better than my 
> recommendation....
>
> -- Jeanfrancois

With this in mind, I decided to provide a test example to see if it is 
truly an issue with Tomcat and not with Forte. So I took the log tag out 
of the examples directory and placed it into its own log.jar with tld 
descriptor. In this war one can see the following layout.

/Test/WEB-INF/lib/log.jar (containing the examples/log tag classes and 
tld file).
/Test/WEB-INF/web.xml (tag descriptor referencing the jar file)
/Test/WEB-INF/build.xml (how the log jar was built)
/Test/jsp (example)

What I've found is that ther are two issues going on

1.) The taglib cannot load in 4.0.3, but does load successfully in 
4.0.4+ and 4.1.* so this is a bug in 4.0.3 LE and Full on WindowsXP/J2sdk.
2.) Since it works on 4.0.4+ and 4.1.* versions of 
Tomcat/WindowsXP/J2sdk, there is *something else wrong* with my taglibs 
that causing failure on those platforms.

I guess I can live without it working on 4.0.3, I'm trying to upgrade 
anyways, if required I can provide a *work-around* for my developers...

So, on 4.1.* with logging cranked way up, I've been seeing errors that 
Jasper encountered a TEI class when the tld already has a variable? Very 
wierd error. Here's an example of a tag in my taglib, if anyone sees 
anything wrong with this please let me know, it is still valid against 
the dtd. (again this was a tld generated by Forte4J).

    <tag>
        <name>catch</name>
        <tag-class>edu.harvard.hmdc.taglib.conditional.CatchTag</tag-class>
        
<tei-class>edu.harvard.hmdc.taglib.conditional.CatchTagTEI</tei-class>
        <body-content>JSP</body-content>
        <description/>
        <variable>
            <name-from-attribute>name</name-from-attribute>
            <variable-class>java.lang.Throwable</variable-class>
            <declare>true</declare>
            <scope>NESTED</scope>
        </variable>
        <attribute>
            <name>class_name</name>
            <required>true</required>
            <rtexprvalue>false</rtexprvalue>
            <type>String</type>
        </attribute>
        <attribute>
            <name>name</name>
            <required>true</required>
            <rtexprvalue>true</rtexprvalue>
            <type>String</type>
        </attribute>
        <example/>
    </tag>

Here is the exception in 4.1.12

org.apache.jasper.JasperException: null(-1,-1) variable subelement 
defined in tld when TagExtraInfo class 
edu.harvard.hmdc.taglib.conditional.CatchTagTEI is non-null
    at 
org.apache.jasper.compiler.DefaultErrorHandler.jspError(DefaultErrorHandler.java:94)
    at 
org.apache.jasper.compiler.ErrorDispatcher.dispatch(ErrorDispatcher.java:417)
    at 
org.apache.jasper.compiler.ErrorDispatcher.jspError(ErrorDispatcher.java:154)
    at 
org.apache.jasper.compiler.TagLibraryInfoImpl.createTagInfo(TagLibraryInfoImpl.java:386)
    at 
org.apache.jasper.compiler.TagLibraryInfoImpl.parseTLD(TagLibraryInfoImpl.java:273)
    at 
org.apache.jasper.compiler.TagLibraryInfoImpl.(TagLibraryInfoImpl.java:183)
    at 
org.apache.jasper.compiler.Parser.parseTaglibDirective(Parser.java:354)
    at org.apache.jasper.compiler.Parser

I get the feeling Forte is generating more information than Jasper Likes.

-Mark