Question

I’m still pretty new to JEE6 having come from a Servlets + JSP style of development on legacy systems. In the applications I worked on we would just throw objects into the various supplied scopes (request, session and application) keyed on a constant String. For example, the User object that represented the currently logged in user would be in the session scope keyed under “current_user”.

I’ve done the same in our new JEE6 application, when the user logs in the User object is bound into the session scope. I’m wondering though if there is a better, more EE, way of handling this?

The problem I’m having is that now I’ve got the User stored in the session it’s awkward to get access to it again. I can get it via JNDI look up or with a few lines of boiler plate code involving FacesContext but neither are very elegant.

Rather than boiler plate code all over the place (the User object is need in a few places) it would be great if I could just get the object injected into a field or method. After all there can only be one object in the session bound to a particular name so there shouldn’t be any ambiguity about what I’m asking for. Is this possible?

Answer 1

Maybe the CDI could be of any help?

Could you define the way you achieve the User object into one, main method?
If so, and you’re working with Java EE 6 environment, you could use the Producer method. Something between these lines:

public class ClassWhichCanAccessUserObject {

    @Produces
    public User produceUser() {
        User u = ... // get the user as you do it right now
        return u;
    } 
}

Then in the place you want to use this class you just Inject it (in the field or method) and use it:

public class MyLogic {
    @Inject
    User u;
}

You need to remember to add the beans.xml file to your classpath, as without the CDI will not work for your module.