Sharing managed beans

Question

Ok �. This is driving me nuts. I�m relatively new to JSF (2 week profession  ), and I may not have grasped the concept of Managed Beans. The problem is detailed below:
Development Environment:
WebSphere Studio 1.5.2 � This creates a backing bean for each respective JSP page that is created, including setters and getters for each managed bean. The two backing beans I�ll talk about whilst specifying the problem are stored in session scope.
The Problem:
I can�t share data between two pages. On the first page I create managed bean in session scope and make this reusable (let�s say person). On the second page I add the reusable Person bean. The resulting entry in the faces.config file is:
<managed-bean>
<managed-bean-name>person</managed-bean-name>
<managed-bean-class>ibm.wlrs.model.PersonVO</managed-bean-class>
<managed-bean-scope>session</managed-bean-scope>
</managed-bean>
Both pages however maintain an independent copy of the managed bean instead of JSF maintaining a shared one. I�ve looked at several documents, and too me it seems as though this bean should be shared between the two pages�� HELP!
On the first page I create a new Person object with the relevant details. This person is created upon a button click added to the backing beans managed bean.
//Page 1 add person from button click
public String doLnkInsertEntryAction() {
System.out.println("Insert");
     Person p1 = new Person();
     p1.setName("Duncan");
     setPerson(p1);
System.out.println(getPerson().getName());
//This prints the person�s name
     return "insert";
I have also setup a page load event to test that the person object stays in the session
//Page 1 page load
public void onPageLoadBegin(FacesContext facescontext) {
     System.out.println(getPerson().getName());
//Prints the person name that was added during the button click event� on Postback or even after going from page1 � page2 and back again.
On Page two if I try and access the managedBean contained within the session, the �name� will always print out as null.
//Page 2 page load
public void onPageLoadBegin(FacesContext facescontext) {
     System.out.println(getPerson().getName());
If I add an any information to the managed bean on page two i.e. person.setName(�Another�), this data stays in the session, only for page two though.
Is this how JSF is supposed to work? I though if a managed bean was stored in the session, the object (and it�s data) should be reusable between pages.
Sorry for the long post�. I though it would be worth while to try and be as specific as possible.
Thanks
Duncan

Answer 1

And� I still don�t understand why two independent
copies are kept by the pages�Because YOU create the copy.
JSF (exactly speaking the default VariableResolver) at first searches for an attribute in
request scope, then session scope, then application scope with the matching name.
Only when no attribute is found, it examines faces-config.xml, creates an instance of
the specified class, and stores the instance in the specified scope.
It never creates two instances with a same name.
I.E� On Page 1�. Several Person objects are stored in
a DataTable. The Vector containing the Person objects
is a managed bean bound to this data table. Upon a
button click I require to extract a person from the
data table and place it into the managed bean session
scope for person. Humm, I guess you misunderstand what the managed bean is.
h:dataTable has the "var" attribute which is used to refer each Person object.
JSF implements the "var" variable as a request scope attribute and re-binds it
to each Person object in the iteration. So, it is not a managed bean but is simply an attribute.
The entry of faces-config.xml is not required.
To know how to pass the selected row data to the next page, please see some
example using h:dataTable and javax.faces.model.DataModel.