Question

I’m sitting at the moment on a legacy system. I’ve got some domain objects which are holding only the key of some entities, now I was wondering what would be the best approach to display the value of the entity instead of the given key.

Could this be done by a converter for the <h:outputText /> tag?

E.g.

DomainObject

public class DomainObject {

    private String keyOfEntityA;

    // getter/setter

}

EntityA

public class EntityA {

private String key;
private String value;

// getter / setter

}

JSF

<h:outputText value="#{controller.domainObject.keyOfEntityA}" />

I don’t want to show the key in this case, I want the object and the value property should be shown.

Is there an elegant way to achieve this or do I have to extend my DomainObject by a wrapper class, which provides the needed objects?

Answer 1

Either replace EntityA by a Map<String, String> so that you can use

<h:outputText value="#{controller.map[controller.domainObject.key]}" />

or get hold of them all in a Map<String, EntityA> with EntityA‘s key as map key so that you can do

<h:outputText value="#{controller.entities[controller.domainObject.key].value}" />

I have the impression that EntityA should really have been a Map<String, String> from the beginning on or a java.util.Properties object if they hold applicationwide configuration settings, or perhaps a ResourceBundle with a bunch of properties files if they represent localized content.