Repeater demo question: how to filter by name?

Question

Hello,
I was looking at the repeater demo in the JSF beta distribution for some help with a problem I'm having.
For example, how would one modify the demo so that #{RepeaterBean.customers} only returns those customers who have a specific name?
My thought:
1) add a new property in RepeaterBean called "customerName".
2) add the following above the data_table in the repeater.jsp:
<h:input_text value="#{RepeaterBean.customerName}"/>
3) Add the appropriate logic in the "RepeaterBean.customers" method to only add those customers to the list whose name is equal to "RepeaterBean.customerName".
Unfortunately, this idea doesn't work. The "data_table" gets at the value of "RepeaterBean.customers" before it sets the value of the "RepeaterBean.customerName". In other words, when "RepeaterBean.customers" is called, it has no idea what the value of "RepeaterBean.customerName" is because it hasn't been set by JSF yet.
The above is a very simple example, and obviously not very useful, but it illustrates a particular problem: data_table inspects its value before other values from the form are set, and thus the data_table's value cannot be based on other form data.
Any ideas on work-arounds or solutions!?
Thanks,
Ryan

Answer 1

The approach you suggest is failing in the beta due to a bug in UIData, where it is too aggressive about caching the list of customers. This has been corrected for the final release.
One thing you might experiment with is having the getCustomers() method return a javax.faces.model.DataModel instead of a List. (You might even find the existing ListDataModel implementation useful for this.) By providing your own DataModel, it may be possible to update the underlying data directly, and therefore not be impacted by the caching.
Craig