Populating managed bean

Question

Hi,
ok, with Bill Dudney's help I managed to figure out how to properly save a bean's state into a database. Now, I'm still lost about initializing the bean with database data to start with.
I thought I could use <managed-property> facility, but I need to be pulling data from a database based on a request parameter (employee id), so this method didn't quite work. Any recommendations?
Thanks
Dmitry

Answer 1

Hi Dmitri,
Glad I could help! Lets see if I can do it again. :-)
Ok the scenario that is in my head based on what I read in your question is this.
Form 1 has a place to type in your employee id (maybe not type but choose or whatever) and a submit button.
On Form 2 you want to display the data related to the employee.
I would approach this problem in this way.
Form 1's submit actionRef would point to an action that would get the data from a Business Delegate (the J2EE Core Pattern) then use that data to populate the Employee managed bean. I typically have each page of my application backed by a 'Page' class that has the data for the form to read and write to as well as actions that are invoked from the page. (BTW if you are in Chicago you can come see me present these ideas @ the nofluffjuststuff.com event next weekend).
Form 2's UIInput and/or UIOutput components valueRef's would referr to the EmployeePage managed bean's attributes to get the data that is would display.
So in your faces-config.xml file you would have something like this
  <managed-bean>
    <description>
      This page manages searching for employees (Form 1 from the discussion above)
    </description>
    <managed-bean-name> empSearchPage </managed-bean-name>
    <managed-bean-class> foo.baz.EmpSearchPage </managed-bean-class>
    <managed-bean-scope> session </managed-bean-scope>
  </managed-bean>
  <managed-bean>
    <description>
      This page manages showing employees (Form 2)
    </description>
    <managed-bean-name> empPage </managed-bean-name>
    <managed-bean-class> foo.baz.EmpPage </managed-bean-class>
    <managed-bean-scope> session </managed-bean-scope>
  </managed-bean>
...Then in your search page you would have something like this
  <h:input_text id="empId" size="32"
                        valueRef="empSearchPage.empId"/>
  <h:command_button id="submit" type="SUBMIT"
                                   label="Search" commandName="search"
                                   actionRef="empSearchPage.searchAction"/>
...Then your emp display page has something like this
  <h:output_text id="empName" size="32"
                          valueRef="empPage.empName"/>
...Then in your empSearchPage.searchAction you would get the data from the Biz Delegate and use that to populate the empPage.
I think this would be better explained with a picture but since I don't to ascii art... :-)
I hope this helps.
TTFN,
-bd-