How to execute bean method before JSF page is loaded?

[Jonathan Eric Miller]

Does anyone know if there is a recommended way to have a bean method 
executed before a JSF page is loaded? For example, I have a page with a 
h:dataTable in it. What I want to do is make it so that when a user brings 
up the page directly (by entering the URL in the browser text box rather 
than as the result of submitting a form), a bean method is executed which 
does a query to a database. I want the bean to be populated before the page 
is rendered. Currently, I'm doing this using a servlet filter. However, one 
problem with this is that Faces isn't initialized at this point. This isn't 
a big issue, but, one issue that I ran into is that I was using a managed 
bean and that bean might not have been created by Faces when the filter 
executes. So, I put some code in to test if the bean is null or not and it 
creates it if necessary. I'm wondering if there is a more recommended way to 
do this within the context of Faces itself. i.e. maybe using a listener or 
something? Note, I only want the code to execute for a specific page. It 
seems like there should be some kind of onInit() method that could be 
overriden to perform initialization before a page is renderered... I don't 
know much about ASP.NET, but, I think it allows you to do something like 
this. I guess I could use a scriptlet in the JSP to do it.

Jon