Useful Data
I know that a lot of people out there in the Java world will agree that the table and other components, such that are found in JSF, are not useful in larger installations if the data only comes directly from a database. Most larger installations will require a MVC architecture and will even hide the data behind services and data access layers. Because of this I will now show you how to bind the table used in the last blog to an array as might be returned by a service.Data Model
First we must have a data object to work with so lets make one for the address. First I made a package named model under the existing jsf.tutorial package then a class Address with all the same fields as in the database, just to keep things consistent. If you are really observant you will see that I changed the structure of my address to be more international, I changed the zip to postalCode and added a countryCode. The following is the Address class that I will use.
package jsf.tutorial.model;
public class Address {
private int id;
private int type;
private String line1;
private String line2;
private String city;
private String state;
private String postalCode;
private int countryCode;
private String note;
public String getCity() {
return city;
}
public void setCity(String city) {
this.city = city;
}
public int getCountryCode() {
return countryCode;
}
public void setCountry(int countryCode) {
this.countryCode = countryCode;
}
public int getId() {
return id;
}
public void setId(int id) {
this.id = id;
}
public String getLine1() {
return line1;
}
public void setLine1(String line1) {
this.line1 = line1;
}
public String getLine2() {
return line2;
}
public void setLine2(String line2) {
this.line2 = line2;
}
public String getNote() {
return note;
}
public void setNote(String note) {
this.note = note;
}
public String getPostalCode() {
return postalCode;
}
public void setPostalCode(String postalCode) {
this.postalCode = postalCode;
}
public String getState() {
return state;
}
public void setState(String state) {
this.state = state;
}
public int getType() {
return type;
}
public void setType(int type) {
this.type = type;
}
}
As a side note you must love the auto generation provided by IDEs.
Next we will put an array of the Addresses in the SessionBean1.
private Address[] addressArray;
public Address[] getAddressArray() {
return addressArray;
}
public void setAddressArray(Address[] addressArray) {
this.addressArray = addressArray;
}
Once we have done this we can then switch over to the Designer of Page1 and change the binding of the table to addressArray. If you right click on the table and select Bind to Data you will not see the addressArray though, which is a bug. For it to show up in the dropdown list in the Bind to Data dialog you must clean and build the project, do this now. Once it is cleaned and built you can then right click on the table and select Bind to Data and drop the list down and you will see addressArray (SessionBean1). Selecting this will give you a list of tables in alphabetical order which is not that hard to change, simply select the column and move it up or down. In this dialog you can also select which rows you do and do not want shown.
Other things you can do
You can select each column and change the header text to capitalize the first chars if you would wish, this being the most noticeable at first. But you can change just about any property from the property editor upon selecting the column or table. If you would like you can also go into the JSP selection to modify it directly but that isn't nearly as fun as doing it in the designer. The property I like the most is the pagination settings on the table itself. You can add pagination to the table easily and give the user control that would normally require a lot of work.
This is supposed to be able to work with Lists also but I have not seen it work yet. If anyone can confirm that it works with Lists and what build it works with please let me know.
That is it for now I hope you have enjoyed working with the tables with POJOs.
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