2.3.31

Page Contents * Changes on the FTL side

• Changes on the Java side
  Release date: 2021-02-16

  CHANGES ON THE FTL SIDE

• Added {{?eval_json}} to evaluate JSON given as flat string. This was added as {{?eval}} is routinely misused for the same purpose, which not only doesn't work for all JSON-s, but can be a security problem. See more here...

• Added new special variable, {{time_zone}} (referred like {{.time_zone}}, like all special variables), to retrieve the current value of the {{time_zone}} setting as a string.

• Allowed escaping {{#}} with backlash in identifier names (not in string), as it used to occur in database column names. Like if you have a column name like {{#users}}, you can refer to it as {{row.#users}}. (Alternatively, {{row['#users']}} always worked, but is often less convenient.)

• FREEMARKER-169: Fixed bug that made {{?c}} and "computer" number format inconsistent. If incomplatible_improvements is set to 2.3.31 (or higher), when you set the {{number_format}} setting to {{computer}} (or you call {{Environment.getCNumberFormat()}}), the format now matches the behavior of {{?c}}, when formatting infinite (positive and negative), and NaN. Matching the behavior of {{?c}} was always the intent, but before this incompatible improvement, the {{computer}} format always behaved like {{?c}} before incompatible improvements 2.3.21, where instead of "INF", and "NaN", the results used Unicode characters U+221E, and U+FFFD.

• Fixed bug where {{.globals}} weren't seen as namesapce, so something like {{<#assign _name_ = _value_ in .globals>}} failed (although you should use {{<#global _name_ = _value_>}} instead anyway).

Changes on the Java side

• More helpful parser error messages for nesting problems (caused by missed or malformed end-tags usually).

• Added {{DOMNodeSupport}} and {{JythonSupport}} {{boolean}} properties to {{DefaultObjectWrapper}}. This allows disabling the special wrapping of DOM nodes and Jython classes. This might be desirable for security reasons.

• FREEMARKER-145: Fixed bug where methods with "overloaded" return type may become inaccessible on Java 9+, if some overriding subclasses are not public. (This is because {{java.beans.Introspector}} behavior has changed with Java 9.)

• FREEMARKER-133: Fixed bug where FreeMarker sometimes tries to expose public methods that are defined or overridden in a non-public class, if the non-public class was then extended by a public class. Calling such method just ends up with {{IllegalAccessException}}, but they shouldn't be exposed on the first place. Furthermore, such a wrong method sometimes replaces the good version of the method, which would be callable. When this glitch happens is somewhat unpredictable, as it also depends on what methods {{java.beans.Introspector}} exposes (which at very least can depend on the Java version), and in what order.

• Fixed bug where OSGi {{Bundle-RequiredExecutionEnvironment}} in {{META-INF/MANIFEST.FM}} has incorrectly contained JavaSE-1.6, J2SE-1.5

• FREEMARKER-159: Set {{Automatic-Module-Name}} to {{freemarker}} in {{META-INF/MANIFEST.FM}}. In most cases this was the deduced Java 9 module name earlier, but that was fragile, as Java has deduced it from the jar file name.

• FREEMARKER-165: Fixed bug where where if the namespace expression in a block assignment (like {{<#assign _x_ in _someNamespace_>...</#assign>}}) refers to a missing variable, or has the wrong type, FreeMarker has thrown {{NullPointerException}} or {{ClassCastException}}, instead of {{InvalidReferenceException}} and {{NonNamespaceException}} with proper helpful message.

• Build related changes:

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  • Simplified the way Apache Ivy is used in our Ant build. It's now used on the standard way, there's no {{ant update-deps}} anymore.

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  • Test suite is now ran on ARM (64 bit) as well on CI (Travis).

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  • FreeMarker Manual and web site now works much better on mobile, because of developments in the Docgen project.

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  • Docgen is now a Maven project, and so a plain Maven dependency of the other projects (although, it's still only in the Apache Snapshot Repository, not in Central yet). With this we could get rid of our Ivy repository.