EL proposals / autocomplete / code assist in Facelets with Eclipse

Question

I tried to activate EL proposals in a Facelets page, but when I hit Ctrl+Space, it doesn't work. I managed to activate JSF tag proposals thank to other questions, but EL proposals aren't working.

How can I activate this feature in Eclipse? Is it a known issue?

For example:

<h:inputHidden id="id" value="#{Ctrl+Space not working!}"/>

Dogmatism

Facelets (XHTML) is the successor of JSP. I believe you're talking about EL proposals instead of JSP proposals, right? I've fixed the terminology. – Womera

A similar question was posted here: #2136718 – Agential

And here, for tag autocompletion: #6205307 – Womera

Thank you for correction! I was speaking about facelets in fact! I tried it and it works good. I noticed that Autocompletion is not working for facesContext.ctrl+space. Do you know if it is possible? – Dogmatism

If you are interested in auto-complete for Spring beans, see: #48934257 – Biffin

Answer 1

Eclipse doesn't support this out the box. Even the support in JSP is very limited. Only the properties of <jsp:useBean> and managed beans hardcoded as <managed-bean> in faces-config.xml are available by autocomplete. There are however plugins which supports EL autocomplete on @ManagedBean and @Named beans.

For example, the JBoss Tools plugin (specifically the CDI feature) which can be installed as described here: How do I Install JBoss AS / WildFly Server in Eclipse for Java EE.

(which has in its current 3.2.0 version unicode bugs, as you see above in the rightmost window)

You can even use Ctrl+Click on the managed bean name #{bean} in an EL expression in Facelets file to navigate to the concrete backing bean class. You can also use Ctrl+Shift+G on the managed bean method in a backing bean class to find all references to the particular property or action in Facelets files.

The Aptana plugin is told to work fine for EL proposals in JSPs, but I am not sure for Facelets. I didn't had good experiences with installing and configuring the plugin for JSP some years ago.

See also:

• Properties of new tags using composite component are not displayed by Eclipse auto complete shortcurt

Womera

Yeah. In Indigo 3.4.0 JBOSS Tools Plugin works with @ annotations too.Thank you Balusc – Dogmatism

JBOSS Tools Plugin working very slow in eclipse Kepler – Cinda

You need to select only the CDI feature. The rest is irrelevant and indeed hoggy. – Womera