Help with implementing a login page - ADF Faces & 10.1.3

Question

I am having trouble getting a basic login page working and am hoping someone can help. I'd like to have a login page with username and password fields and a submit button. When submitted, I would like to authenticate the user and either send them to a second page if I find the username & password, or return them to the login page and display a global JSF message if I can't find the username/password info. Pretty standard stuff.
I've got an app module that contains a read-only view object, which has a custom method (in MyViewImpl.java) that checks the username & password against a database table and returns a boolean. I don't have an entity object since it's a read-only view.
I've tried 2 different approaches:
1) Binding the username and pw inputText fields to the parameters of my custom method, and binding the submit button to the custom method, all done by drag and drop from my data controls.
The problem with this approach is that I cannot figure out how to set the global message if the username/password combo is invalid. Once my method is invoked, it returns an "action" String and page navigation occurs (In this case, I have my custom method return a String instead of a boolean). If login fails, at what point do I set the global message?
2) Using a backing bean for my login page and binding the fields and the button to the bean, and setting the button's action to a method in the bean, which then calls my custom method. Finally, either set the message or navigate based on the boolean returned from my method.
This seems the better approach, since it keeps the navigation and error message in the ViewController. The problem here is that I can't figure out how to call my custom method from my backing bean. I've seen a few examples, including one using a managed property and calling the action binding's invoke() method, but haven't had any luck (see #51 on this page: http://radio.weblogs.com/0118231/stories/2004/09/23/notYetDocumentedAdfSampleApplications.html). The invoke() method does not return a value, so I cannot get the boolean value I need.
So, I'm apparently missing a piece (or two or three) of the puzzle here. Any guidance is most welcome! And I'm fine with changing any piece of this puzzle if there's a better way of accomplishing this.
Thanks,
Andy

Answer 1

Frank,
Thanks for your reply. I'm not sure if container managed authentication is a good fit or not for my current application, so I will have to look into the details of how it works. Thanks for the suggestion. Whether I use it or not, I will still need to authenticate against a database and not a flat file due to the fact that users may come and go and change passwords frequently, and my application will not be handling the management of that.
So, I would be still left with the task of accessing the ViewObject and navigating/displaying a message based on the results of that lookup. Fortunately, after slogging through my code and consulting the ADF documentation that is scattered throughout the Oracle website, I was able to get the login page working as I wanted (I found the "Accessing Bindings and Binding Containers from JSF Backing Beans" section of http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jdev/tips/muench/1013eabinding/index.html to be especially helpful). I used the submit button's action to call a method in the backing bean that sent the username and password to my application module's custom authentication method. When I got the boolean result, I either returned a "success" action or set a global JSF message and returned "null".
Needless to say, I am looking forward to the ADF/JSF version of the Toystore application, along with some sort of comprehensive framework documentation.
Thanks,
Andy