Use a converter?

Question

I imagine a number of people have run into this, but I haven't been able to find anything on it yet...
Our users want the phone number to be broken into three fields representing the 3 part of a US phone number. However, we are sharing objects with another line of business that demands phone number be stored as a single text field.
Is there any way to map the three fields in the HTML into a String with standard JSF or would some sort of custom work need to be done?
Thanks in advance for you help!

Answer 1

I imagine a number of people have run into this, but
I haven't been able to find anything on it yet...True, I've been looking as well.
Our users want the phone number to be broken into
three fields representing the 3 part of a US phone
number. However, we are sharing objects with another
line of business that demands phone number be stored
as a single text field.Three separate input fields but bound to the one value?
Is there any way to map the three fields in the HTML
into a String with standard JSF or would some sort of
custom work need to be done?The J2EE 1.4 Tutorial has chapter 20 (pg 783) that is entitled 'Creating Custom UI Components'. On the next page, there is a section, when to use a Custom Component. Second bullet point:
'You need to aggregate components to create a new component that has it's own unique behaviour. The component must be a custom component. One example is a date chooser component consisting of three drop-down lists.'
Which is exactly what I was looking for. In your case, substitute input fields for drop downs and we are talking the same thing.
You'll most probably also need to add in a validator and converter as well to support it.
Which brings me to the obvious question: Are there any public (or commercially) available JSF Component libraries out there?
-Chris