Using Business Components in JSF pages

Question

I have several questions about using BCs in JavaServer Faces pages. I'm new to the JSF-BC development world.
Here's what I'm trying to accomplish: a salesperson gets a call from a customer requesting a quote. The salesperson selects the URL for my RFQ form and begins filling it out. If there is an existing customer record in the company's database, the salesperson wants to be able to load customer info into the form from the database, rather than typing it all in. Reasonable enough, and probably simply enough.
But it's kickin' my butt. I've created the domain objects (including one for the customer database, call it "CU") and the model objects (a View Object that filters out all fields but those needed on the form, an Application Module with a View Object Instance). Initially I am routing from the main form window to a dialog window where I am hosting the customer selection components, intending to return to the main window with the selection. On the dialog window I've dropped the VO and configured it to be an ADF Navigation List (which gets implemented as an af:selectOneChoice component). So far so good. The navigation to and from is working fine. The selectOneChoice list is being populated with the first range of returned records. Here's where I'm stuck.
First of all I can't figure out how to kick the iterator into sending additional records after it's first range. You can scroll down to the end of the list in the selectOneChoice component but nothing happens after that. I know I can set the iterator's range to 0 to get all of the records dumped in at once, but that takes way too long. Any ideas?
Secondly, when a selection is made, how do I access the selected data? I have set up a ValueChangeListener method in my dialog's backing bean that gets the NewValue() from the event object, but that value turns out to be the index into the collection of selectItems. How do I get the value of the data that shows in the list? Is that the label of the selectItem? If so, how do I access it? What I really want is to get the entire row of data represented by the returned index, but I'm lost as to how to do that. Any help would be much appreciated.
At some point I want to let the salesperson type in a partial customer name and then retrieve only records matching the query's where clause. I see where I can create a bind variable on the view object, but am not sure how to pass the partial name value from the main form to the dialog. Currently I use an EL expression in the Action attribute of an af:selectInputText component to navigate to the dialog and I don't think I can pass parameters with that. I guess I would have to switch to using a method binding to a backing bean, eh? But even if I can get the partial name value to the dialog, how do I bind that value to the bind variable of the VO? (the VO that is already bound to the af:selectOneChoice component in the dialog.)
And I am totally open to alternative suggestions for how to accomplish the original intention of all of this. Thanks for any guidance.
Johnny Lee

Answer 1

Thanks, Shay. That has gotten me a few steps further along. I modified my VO by creating a bind variable and modified the SQL to use this variable in it's where clause. I generated Java for my AppMod (which I hadn't done before, preferring to keep things simple) and created a method to supply a value to my VO's new bind variable. I need a little more hand-holding, though, to wire an input text field & button (or af:selectInputText?) to both the AppMod's new method AND the data component that will display the query results.
"...drag the exposed method as a button onto a JSF page." That's easy enough, but I haven't yet figured out from the examples how to associate the value of an input component with the parameter of the AppMod's new method. It's getting late, I'm starting to see cross-eyed so I will sleep on this and take another look in the morning. Thanks for your help.
Johnny Lee