[Building Sakai] empty sakai.properties issues (2.9.0)

[Thomas, Gregory J]

I'm not sure if anyone else has ran into this issue yet, but during the 2.9 upgrade process IU is doing, I've found on a few of occasions that if you have property with nothing defined as a value, the code will treat it as a null instead of empty.

For example, in the Site Info > Manage Access > Global Access section, we don't want the drop down to restrict roles with site.upd, we want all roles in the site to be available. (https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-18462)  Tried to use this in sakai.properties:

siteinfo.prohibited_permission_for_joiner_role=

Using the debugger in SiteAction with the getJoinerRoles function, we have this code:

/** related to SAK-18462, this is a list of permissions that the joinable roles shouldn't have ***/
String[] prohibitPermissionForJoinerRole = ServerConfigurationService.getStrings("siteinfo.prohibited_permission_for_joiner_role");
if (prohibitPermissionForJoinerRole == null) {
prohibitPermissionForJoinerRole = new String[]{"site.upd"};
}

The prohibitPermissionForJoinerRole variable claims it is a null, while really it should be empty and has been treated that way in the past.  I've ran across a few others for localized IU properties that are causing issues.  I'm not sure if others have experienced this with empty properties and don't have an answer on what might be causing it (new version of tomcat, new version of java/jvm, etc etc).

Thanks,
Greg
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