$!{text} toString()'s to "" instead of null

What about just making it such that GroovyTemplates (possibly optionally) don't print nulls.

Its very amateurish when websites print nulls all over the place.

Especially with the null safe method invocations, it would be nice to be able to use.

${user->lastLogin}

Another thought, would be to use an OR, since this will let you give an alternative.

${user->lastLogin || "Never Logged In"}

But I don't think this will work, since || quite rightly is a boolean expression, even though "if (a)" works.

1> print (a || "b")
2> execute
true

Maybe use the ?: notation.

println "Hello there ${user ?: "uknown user"} how are you doing?"

Velocity uses the nice notation that if you don't wanna print nulls then you do

$!foo

which I like.

Also if we wanna handle printing of things with defaults, we should support

defaultValue = "anonymous"
println "hello ${foo || defaultValue} there"

Using the || operator to allow nulls to be handled in a more graceful way

I believe this is now covered by:

def user
assert "Hello ${user ?: "unknown user"}, how are you?" == 'Hello unknown user, how are you?'
user = "Paul"
assert "Hello ${user ?: "unknown user"}, how are you?" == 'Hello Paul, how are you?'

Please reopen if you believe further enhancement is required.