Question

I would like to call a setter directly from a command button and pass a value. My problem is that the setter is expecting a Character and jsf if passing it back as a String. Is there a good way to ‘fix’ this on the front end instead of having to over load the setter on my backing bean?

commandButton:

<p:commandButton value="SignOff"
    actionListener="#{manageItemHandler.dataEntryOp.setBomComplete('Y')}"
    rendered="#{speed2Session.isRendered('editManageItemOp')}"/>

getter/setter from backing bean:

protected Character bomComplete;

/**
 * @return the bomComplete
 */
public Character getBomComplete() {
    return bomComplete;
}
/**
 * @param bomComplete the bomComplete to set
 */
public void setBomComplete(Character bomComplete) {
    this.bomComplete = bomComplete;
}

When I click the commandbutton I get

11:47:19,270 SEVERE [javax.enterprise.resource.webcontainer.jsf.context] (http-steves-172.16.8.26-15081-1) JSF1073: javax.faces.event.AbortProcessingException caught during processing of INVOKE_APPLICATION 5 : UIComponent-ClientId=centerForm:j_idt271, Message=Method not found: [e-mail](java.lang.String)
11:47:19,273 SEVERE [javax.enterprise.resource.webcontainer.jsf.context] (http-steves-172.16.8.26-15081-1) Method not found: [e-mail](java.lang.String): javax.faces.event.AbortProcessingException: Method not found: [e-mail](java.lang.String)

Answer 1

This is unfortunately by design. Everything in quotes is in EL treated as String. A workaround would be to pass String#charAt() instead.

#{manageItemHandler.dataEntryOp.setBomComplete('Y'.charAt(0))}

This is only ugly. An alternative is to pass its int codepoint instead, which is 89 for Y.

#{manageItemHandler.dataEntryOp.setBomComplete(89)}

But this is not exactly self-documenting. Much better is to just make use of enums.

public enum Choice {
    Y, N;
}

with

protected Choice bomComplete;

which you can just invoke the desired way

#{manageItemHandler.dataEntryOp.setBomComplete('Y')}

The string 'Y' will be automatically converted to that enum. As a bonus, enums have many more additional advantages, such as compile time type safety.