Bug 14465

Summary:	position() and last() are critical
Product:	Taglibs	Reporter:	James Lewis <jlewis36>
Component:	Standard Taglib	Assignee:	Tomcat Developers Mailing List <dev>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED
Severity:	critical	CC:	asgeir, ltchean, Nils_Kilden-Pedersen
Priority:	P3
Version:	1.0
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	Other
OS:	All

Description James Lewis 2002-11-12 04:51:38 UTC

The expressions last() and position() both return 0 in every iteration of a 
forEach tag.  It is real hard to develop a JSTL app without these expressions 
working.  When will this be fixed?  Below is a simple example that will 
demonstrate the problem:

<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jstl/xml" prefix="x" %>
<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jstl/core" prefix="c" %>

<html>

<head>
<title>Test</title>
</head>

<body>

<x:parse var="xml">
	<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
	<root>
		<name>
			<first>James</first>
		</name>
		<name>
			<first>Jose</first>
		</name>
		<name>
			<first>Jen</first>
		</name>
	</root>
</x:parse>

<x:forEach select="$xml/root/name">
	<x:out select="first"/>
	<x:out select="position()"/>
</x:forEach>
</body>
<html>

In this example the position() returns '0' every time.

Comment 1 Shawn Bayern 2002-11-12 12:32:48 UTC

This isn't a bug in the implementation; I believe it requires additional 
support from the JSTL specification before being implemented.  In particular, 
the following definitions would need to be added:

I believe it would involve adding definitions to the
spec along the following lines:

 Inside the body of the <x:forEach> tag, the context for XPath expression
 evaluations is obtained as follows:

  * variable, function, and namespace bindings operate as in the rest of
    JSTL
  * the context node is the node whose representation would be exposed by
    'var' (whether or not the 'var' attribute is specified)
  * the context position is the iteration 'count' (with the same meaning
    as in <c:forEach>)
  * the context size is equal to the number of nodes in the node-set
    over which <x:forEach> is presently iterating.

We're also considering adding varStatus, which would provide an alternative 
mechanism for achieving the same result.

Just because I'm marking this "INVALID" here doesn't mean it's not important; 
I'm just noting that it's not an implementation issue.  (This bug-tracking 
system is just for implementation issues.)

Comment 2 Pierre Delisle 2002-12-04 01:11:59 UTC

*** Bug 14687 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 3 Pierre Delisle 2002-12-18 14:49:37 UTC

*** Bug 15483 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4 Jeremy Boynes 2010-12-31 18:23:10 UTC

Fixed with XPath refactoring in r1054175

Comment 5 Jeremy Boynes 2010-12-31 18:24:00 UTC

*** Bug 22765 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***