Question

I am developing a project using Hibernate and JSF. My question is:

Can I directly manipulate Hibernate POJO’s from my backing bean? I.e. in my form can I refer #{mybackingBean.myPOJO.propertyName}?
From myBackingBean, can I call methods like findAll(), save(), findById(id)?

Is this good design or if any complications exist please advice me.

Answer 1

can I directly manipulate Hibernate POJO’s from my backing bean?

Yes, you can do so.

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can I call methods like findAll(), save(), findById(id)

Yes, you can do so. I however expect to see those methods in a service/DAO class, not in a POJO.

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Is this good design or if any complications exist

Depends on the functional/business requirements. If you need to design your JSF views based on the data model, then you can often just use the POJOs as-is. If you however need to design your JSF views based on a business model which does not necessarily fit 1-to-1 with the data model, or when you want to abstract the data layer completely away (i.e. Hibernate is merely a “implementation detail” and supposed to be exchangeable with Plain JDBC or the modern JPA), then you often need to introduce an extra abstract layer with DTOs which are mapped from/to POJOs and then use only those DTOs in JSF side. In any way, you should not explode the POJO/DTO in a JSF backing bean, but just make the whole entity a property of it and use it as #{bean.entity.property}.