Hi, I have the typical application where several entities (clients, invoices, budgets, etc.) can be consulted and CRUD operated. I want to have a common structure for all of them with:
a) A search criteria form, made of any type of input control (text, combo, etc.) b) Below, a button to search using the entered criteria by the user. c) Below, a tabbed panel with several tabs, where the results are presented in different manners. Assume my JSF bean is request-scoped (due to session memory constraints) and it has the model containing the criteria. If I submit the criteria form using the button (where its immediate property is set to "false"), the model obviously gets updated in my JSF bean, so: 1) The model gets updated in the Update Model JSF phase. 2) I can use that model from my JSF to invoke my business logic with the criteria. 3) When the page is rendered again, the results are displayed and also the criteria, so the user can see what criteria has led to those results. But the problem comes when I change from one tab to another. As the component does neither update the model nor expose the immediate property: 1) The model doesn't get updated 2) I cannot call pass the criteria to the business logic, so I just can't find the correct results. 3) When the page is rendered again, the criteria has dissapeared and obviously the results are not those expected. So what can I do? There are some possible solutions: a) Change the JSF bean to session scoped, so the components are not recreated in each request and are always updated (not through my JSF bean model, but through the JSF component model itself). I *must* avoid this solution. b) Bind a variable in my JSF bean to each input criterion in the criteria form, as the binding properties get always invoked by the JSF lifecycle. Then, inside my JSF bean, whenever I need to do the search, I must get the criteria values from the binded variables. c) Any more you may propose... What do you think? How are you facing this functionality in your applications?
