Bean advice

Question

I want to use a JavaBean to represent a user in my application (a JSP/servlet app). But I am wondering if I have the right approach -- here is the basic idea:
My bean, UserBean, has three properties (so far):
- name (String)
- password (String)
- authorized (boolean)
In addition to the getter/setter methods that I understand are required of all beans, I have one extra method (which will probably be protected or private in the final code):
attemptAuthorization()
which basically does the work of determining whether the name and password are a valid combination to call setAuthorized().
Now, here's my two questions:
(1) Is it okay to have this non-getter/setter method? It seems to me that for the most part, beans are pretty much just getters and setters.
(2) Is it okay to have a setter method perform a side effect, such as calling the setAuthorized() setter method? Here is my code:
     * sets the <code>password</code> of the UserBean.  If the <code>name</code>
     * of the UserBean has already been set (is not null), this method attempts
     * to set the <code>authorized</code> property.
    public void setPassword(String password) {
        this.password = password;
        if (getName() != null) {
            attemptAuthorization();
    }It just seems like having methods that perform these kinds of side effects might invalidate my class from being a true javabean.
Thanks!

Answer 1

(1) Is it okay to have this non-getter/setter method?
It seems to me that for the most part, beans are
pretty much just getters and setters.
(2) Is it okay to have a setter method perform a side
effect, such as calling the setAuthorized()
setter method? (1) and (2) are fine. You have a bean when you have a serializable class with a no-arg Ctor and get/set for the bean's properties, which,in your case, are 3 : name, password, and authorized.
Keep in mind that adding side-effects is fine as long as you satisfy the basic requirements above. The only thing that too many of those side-effects might cause sometimes could be the re-usability of the bean in another context/JVM/machine...but that doesn't seem the case here.