Question

My User entity class have several member variables (e.g. String firstName) which are persisted and some transient variables (e.g. transient boolean selected) which are not.

I have used the transient variable to capture a checkbox selection, but invariably the value never gets set and procesed properly until I set another bean value along with it.

i.e. If User has firstName (mapped to a text field) and selected (mapped to a checkbox)
If I just selected the value doesn’t seem to be set on an update
If I had selected the checkbox and the firstName field, the “selected” value is captured properly

Can anyone tell me why this is happening?

@Entity @Table(name = "User") 
public class User implements Serializable { 

    @Id @GeneratedValue(strategy = IDENTITY) 
    @Column(name = "id", unique = true, nullable = false, insertable = false, updatable = false) 
    private Integer id; 

    @Column(name = "first_Name") 
    private String firstName; 

    @Transient private boolean selected; // getters and setters 
} 

            <rich:dataTable value="#{users}" var="_user" style="width:auto;">
...
                <rich:column>
                    <f:facet name="header">Select</f:facet>
                    <h:selectBooleanCheckbox value="#{_user.selected}"/>
                </rich:column>
            </rich:dataTable>

Answer 1

We just saw a workaround to this issue. We were able to capture the value of the selected variable in our action classes (e.g. EntityQuery) but it didn’t work in the @PreUpdate methods exposed by the entity. This seems to work fine now.