suggestionbox selected item's object value retrieval

[carlhowarth]

Hello there,

I have successfully set up the ajax suggestion box - I provide a list of User objects and can successfully choose a user and have their name displayed in an inputText control.

I would like to be able to retrieve the actual object that has been selected in my backing bean, rather than the string displayed in the text box, so that I can do further processing with it.

Unfortunately it's not as simple as looping through my list until I match the text value, as there are some duplicate entries in the list - the user knows which to choose as it's a multiple column suggest with additional user info being displayed, however I do not want to display the additional information in the input text control.

Please could somebody explain if this will be possible, and if so how I would go about it?

Many thanks in advance, Carl

[ilya_shaikovsky]

use "fetchvalue" to define which of the columns must be displayed in the input

[carlhowarth]

Hello - I have done that already - I show 'displayName' which is a property of my user and is working fine. The issue is fetching the actual underlying selected object in the backing bean - displayName is not necessarily unique therefore I can't just loop until I find a matching user...

I have got around it by setting the fetchvalue to equal the object's id then the display value I require delimited with a |, I then use the onitemselect javascript to split these up and place my id in a hidden value... a little messy but it works! If there's a better way I'd like to hear it.

Cheers, Carl

[damianharvey]

I have a similar requirement. I am currently doing the same and setting the fetch value to the id + some delimiter + label and parsing it on the backend.

Functionally this requirement is similar to how the Seam selectItems currently works; ie. it passes the whole object to the backend (have a look at it here: http://wiki.jboss.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=SeamEntityConverter).

My understanding is that you should be able to use the Seam entityConverter to do this. I have asked this question in the Seam forum (http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&t=104306) and raised a feature request in the Seam JIRA so hopefully Pete Muir will get a chance to look at it.

Cheers,

Damian.