JSF Databinding

Question

Hi All,
I have a questions regarding the databinding of objects on a JSF page. I come from the world of .Net and have to redesign our intranet in Java using the webcenter framework and a little confused about how this works?
In .NET I have a page let's say Default.aspx, associated with that page is a codebehind file called Default.aspx.cs (CSharp)
Now lets say that I drop a .NET Gridview onto the page and bind it to a datasource which is a list of employees in a database table.
So far so good, I managed to do this in Java
What if I wanted this grid of employees to recognize the current user and bold their name?
In .NET in the code behind page I have access to a method called GridViewOnDatabind() and in that method I can evaluate the results of the data source for each record and look for the current username, when I find the username I am after I can apply some style to it.
For example, here is a snippet to try and explain what I mean
public void GridViewOnDatabind(eventargs e, sender s)
if(s.getColumn["lastName"].toString().Equals("Ragsdale"))
s.getColumn["lastName"].style.add("font-weight", "bold");
The nice thing about this is that .NET allows me to separate this kind of logic from the view page and keeps it in a source file. Please tell me that Java can do something similar without putting code inside the page itself?
If anyone could explain how this would be done that would be awesome, I use this sort of logic everyday in most of my applications. Also if anyone could recommend a good book or tutorial for someone coming from .NET that would be great as well.
Thanks a ton in advance.

Answer 1

You can write this code in a JSF managed bean that has access to your component.
But a simpler way of doing it would be to use an expression language in your item definition to conditionally highlight it:
http://stegemanoracle.wordpress.com/2007/06/03/conditionally-showing-fields-based-upon-attribute-value-part-deux/
http://thepeninsulasedge.com/frank_nimphius/2008/04/10/adf-faces-conditionally-color-table-cell-background-2/