SpEL: support for inline list expressions [SPR-7335]

[spring-projects-issues]

Andy Clement opened SPR-7335 and commented

This is a feature that is repeatedly requested in emails to me. I'm planning to reactivate (the previously written then removed) inline list support. At the moment users are having to make calls out to the Arrays type to build lists, eg.

T(java.util.Arrays).asList(1,2,3)

this will be very expensive (method invocation every time) compared to something like this

{1,2,3}

which, if expression evaluation is smart, will result in a single immutable constant list (of type ArrayList). Following on from that we can build the array construction syntax:

new int[]{1,2,3}

—

If you read this Juergen, are you ok with adding it?

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Affects: 3.0.3

Referenced from: commits f5ced9b

[spring-projects-issues]

Andy Clement commented

Support is in.

Basic lists work: "{1,2,3}" "{'abc','def'}"
nested lists work: "1,2},{3,4"
Basic arrays work: "new int[3]"
Arrays with initializers work: "new int[]{1,2,3}"
Conversion works for array initializer values: "new String[]{1,2,3}" - numbers are converted to strings
multi dimensional arrays are supported unless initializers are used, so "new int[5][10]" works but "new int[][]1,2},{3,4" will give an error indicating a current restriction