How to populate data before displaying jsp in JSF ?

Question

I have the following situation :
In my app, i have a couple of left-navigation menus, when i click on one of them, i need to show some history data. So, i first need to call a managed bean on click of the link, fetch data and forward to history jsp page.
How do call the managed bean directly (like struts action page) before going to JSP first ? Whenever i give a link to "something.faces", it goes to the jsp directly ?

Answer 1

There are two solutions on my mind. The first is to use the Shale ViewController where you got prerender() method and in it you could fetch the data. The second solution is to fetch the data in the getter method of your property but remember that the getter method could be invoked more than once per request so putting expencive code in it could be dangerous. Use singleton instance of the fetched property, something like:
getMyProperty() {
if (myProperty == null) {
.... fetch the data
return myProperty;
}