Best Practice - Converting raw property values of Beans

[Bieringer Dominik]

Hi all,   today I’ve wondered again about how to convert property values of Beans to locale specific strings in the presentation layer. To make it clear what I want to do, I will show you a small example (This code is not compileable… It’s just for demonstration purpose):   Consider a class MyBean:   public class MyBean {             public String getCategoryId();  // Can get values ‘CatA’, ‘CatB’, ‘CatC’ }   Now consider having JSF code like this:   <h:panelGroup>             <h:outputText value=”#{myBean.categoryId}”/> </h:panelGroup>   This would produce output like this on my webpage:   ‘CatA’ or ‘CatB’ or ‘CatC’   The problem is that I don’t want to display these raw values of the JavaBean, instead I want to display specific strings stored somewhere in the presentation layer, for example in a message.properties file, which I can use in the JSP file. But how to do that efficiently and what”s the best practice for doing so? I frequently have this problem, not only with String types, but also with Java 1.5 Enum types….   At the moment I am solving the problem the following way: I am using a message.property file for JSF… which looks like the following:   Category_A=Category A Category_B=Category B Category_C=Category C   Next I am rewriting the JavaBean class, so that it look’s like the following:   public class MyBean {             public String getCategoryId();  // Can get values ‘CatA’, ‘CatB’, ‘CatC’               public boolean getIsCategoryA() {                         return (this.getCategoryId().equals(“CatA”));             }               … }   Then I can change my JSF code to look like the following:   <h:panelGroup>             <h:outputText value=”#{Msg.Category_A}” rendered=”#{myBean.isCategoryA}”/>             <h:outputText value=”#{Msg.Category_B}” rendered=”#{myBean.isCategoryB}”/>             <h:outputText value=”#{Msg.Category_C}” rendered=”#{myBean.isCategoryC}”/> </h:panelGroup>   I accepted this method at first, but as I’ve already said, I’m having this problem very often and I don’t feel comfortable about doing it that way.. that’s not really beautiful and get’s really cumbersome if there are more than 3 different possibilities….   I know that there must be a mapping of the Java bean values and the message.properties file, but I don’t think that it’s a good idea to change the JavaBean class to reflect my need… For me the bean is not part of the presentation layer any more….   I am looking forward to get some feedback and to hear about how you are solving this problem.   Thx in advance, Dominik