I am using tomcat 7 on CentOS 7 and I need to pass a null value to tag attributes of type Long/Integer/Float, however it is *always* coerced to zero.
<%@attribute name="parentId" required="true" rtexprvalue="true" type="java.lang.Long" %> Changing required to false does nothing. I tried setting the system property org.apache.el.parser.COERCE_TO_ZERO to false in tomcat.conf (-Dorg.apache.el.parser.COERCE_TO_ZERO=false with my other JAVA_OPTS) but this does nothing. The value before it hits the tag is null and inside the tag is 0. If I query the System properties it shows it as set to false, but Tomcat is not honoring it and is still coercing nulls to zero. I understand the spec says to do this etc but that defeats the purpose of using an object vs atomic type in the first place and is horribly shortsighted. Upgrading to Tomcat 8 is not a solution unfortunately as there is no RPM for it. How do I pass a null Long/Float/Integer as a tag attribute and have it kept as null and not turned into an incorrect value? Chris
