In the previous example you have learnt How do I compare values in Spring EL?. Where you saw how to compare two simple values for equality, less-than or greater-than, etc. In practice, you might need to combine one or more of this comparison into a more complex logical expressions.

Spring EL also provides several operators that can be used to do this kind of logical operations. These operators are shown in the following table.

Here is an example using the logical and operator in the spring configuration file:

<property name="largeGlass" value="#{smallGlass.maxVolume ge 20 and smallGlass.maxVolume le 30}"/>

The configuration above will set the largeGlass property above to true if the glass maxVolume is greater-that-or-equal to 20 and less-than-or-equal to 30. It will only be considered as a large glass if the volume is between 20 and 30. So we use the logical and operator in that expression to evaluate the value for the largeGlass property. Now let’s see the complete example.

First let’s define the MyOtherGlass pojo.

package org.kodejava.spring.core.el;

public class MyOtherGlass {
    private boolean empty;
    private boolean halfEmpty;
    private int volume;
    private int maxVolume;
    private boolean largeGlass;

    public MyOtherGlass() {
    }

    public MyOtherGlass(int volume, int maxVolume) {
        this.volume = volume;
        this.maxVolume = maxVolume;
    }

    public boolean isEmpty() {
        return empty;
    }

    public void setEmpty(boolean empty) {
        this.empty = empty;
    }

    public boolean isHalfEmpty() {
        return halfEmpty;
    }

    public void setHalfEmpty(boolean halfEmpty) {
        this.halfEmpty = halfEmpty;
    }

    public int getVolume() {
        return volume;
    }

    public void setVolume(int volume) {
        this.volume = volume;
    }

    public int getMaxVolume() {
        return maxVolume;
    }

    public void setMaxVolume(int maxVolume) {
        this.maxVolume = maxVolume;
    }

    public boolean isLargeGlass() {
        return largeGlass;
    }

    public void setLargeGlass(boolean largeGlass) {
        this.largeGlass = largeGlass;
    }
}

After creating the pojo, let’s now create our spring configuration file where we define the smallGlass bean and the largeGlass bean.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
       xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd">

    <bean id="smallGlass" class="org.kodejava.spring.core.el.MyOtherGlass">
        <constructor-arg name="volume" value="5" />
        <constructor-arg name="maxVolume" value="10" />
        <property name="largeGlass" value="#{smallGlass.maxVolume ge 20 and smallGlass.maxVolume le 30}" />
    </bean>
    <bean id="largeGlass" class="org.kodejava.spring.core.el.MyOtherGlass">
        <constructor-arg name="volume" value="5" />
        <constructor-arg name="maxVolume" value="30" />
        <property name="largeGlass" value="#{largeGlass.maxVolume ge 20 and largeGlass.maxVolume le 30}" />
    </bean>

</beans>

And finally let’s create a class to run this configuration file in the console:

package org.kodejava.spring.core.el;

import org.springframework.context.support.ClassPathXmlApplicationContext;

public class SpELLogicalExpression {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try (ClassPathXmlApplicationContext context =
                     new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("spel-logical-expression.xml")) {

            MyOtherGlass smallGlass =
                    (MyOtherGlass) context.getBean("smallGlass");
            MyOtherGlass largeGlass =
                    (MyOtherGlass) context.getBean("largeGlass");

            System.out.println("smallGlass.isLargeGlass() = " + smallGlass.isLargeGlass());
            System.out.println("largeGlass.isLargeGlass() = " + largeGlass.isLargeGlass());
        }
    }
}

This code will give you the following output when executed:

smallGlass.isLargeGlass() = false
largeGlass.isLargeGlass() = true

Maven Dependencies

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-core</artifactId>
        <version>5.3.23</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-beans</artifactId>
        <version>5.3.23</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-context-support</artifactId>
        <version>5.3.23</version>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>