JSF converter implementation notes

SEAM's built-in converters are big time-savers, especially the s:convertEntity and s:convertEnum. Now the needs of rolling out customized JSF converters are few and far between, I just want to jot down the patterns I had used in case I forget.

1. take the entity's primary ID as string, and load it from persistence media by ID to convert back to object


2. implement an algorithm that can encode the object into a unique string, and reconstruct the object by parsing the string


3. Construct a map of strings and objects. Because converters are instantiated on demand, you have to save the map in a backing bean whose life-cycle spans over requests. The map is nested in the h:selectOneMenu component using f:attribute tag, so that the converter can get a handle of it.
   <br /><h:selectOneMenu id="dropDown" value="#{bean.selectedOption}"><br /> <s:selectItems value="#{beanManager.options}" var="o" label="#{o.label}"/><br /> <f:attribute name="options" value="#{beanManager.options}"/><br /> </h:selectOneMenu><br />
   

SEAM Howto - end conversation and go back to the previous page

In web application it is often desirable to provide a "Cancel" button in a function area which will redirect the user back to the page they come from.

In SEAM if the function area is wrapped by a conversation, then there are two ways to archive this navigation effect, depending on whether or not you need to do clean up when ending the conversion.

If there is no clean up to be done, you can use s:link or s:button as shown in the example below. The action is invoked first. The view attribute is rendered if redirect did not happen after the action invocation.
<br /><s:button value="Cancel" action="#{conversation.endAndRedirect}" view="/defaultPage.xhtml"></s:button><br />
If there is clean up to be done, you can archive this in pages.xml file with a navigation hack.

In your pages.xml:
<br /><navigation from-action="#{backingBean.cleanup}" evaluate="#{conversation.endAndRedirect}"><br /> <rule outcome="false"><br /> <redirect id="/defaultPage.xhtml"></redirect><br /> </rule><br /></navigation><br />