Craig, I think we're talking about two slightly different things.
I'm talking about creating a JSF Converter as a subclass of some kind
of generic converter. You'd use the generic converter outside of JSF
and the JSF converter inside JSF. That way, you don't need to mock
up a FacesContext or UIComponent.
I still don't see how you can use dependency injection on a JSF
converter inside a JSF application. What am I missing? I've got a
managed bean (database-backed data source) that I'd love to inject
into my converters. Currently I have to ask JSF for the bean by name
inside my converter code.....
One thing to note is that the "converter" property (at least on the standard components) can be value bound to a Converter instance ... which could be a managed bean ... which could have a property ... that is initialized (via a value binding _expression_) ... to inject yet another bean. Or, as a concrete example:
Page1.jsp:
<h:inputText id="entryDate" ... converter="#{entryDateConverter}" .../>
Managed beans section of faces-config.xml:
<!-- Declare my Converter instance -->
<managed-bean>
<managed-bean-name>entryDateConverter</managed-bean.name>
<managed-bean-class>com.mycompany.mypackage.MyEntryDateConverter</managed-bean-class>
<!-- Don't actually store the instance in any scope -->
<managed-bean-scope>none</managed-bean-scope>
<managed-property>
<property-name>special</property-name>
<property-class>com.mycompany.mypackage.MySpecialWIdgetType</property-class>
<value>#{injected}</value>
</managed-property>
</managed-bean>
<!-- Declare the bean that is injected into my Converter instance -->
<managed-bean>
<managed-bean-name>injected</managed-bean-name>
<managed-bean-class>com.mycompany.mypackage.MySpecialWidgetType</property-class>
<managed-bean-scope>none</managed-bean-scope>
...
</managed-bean>
In other words, managed beans provide a basic but quite functional dependency injection framework all by themselves. If that's not enough, Spring includes an adapter so that you could transparently use Spring's BeanFactory instead.
Craig
