best practices: reference data in the application context

[patrick_ibg]

For things like drop-down menus that are backed by entity beans (e.g., State, Country,...) one would have to create a collection of SelectItem objects.

I would think that these belong to the application context. What's the best way to put them there on startup (or first invokation)?

I'm thinking I'd need an SFSB, as it requires a persistence context to get the data, and it holds state (the reference data itself).

[gavin.king]

thats one good way, or you can use a SLSB that just throws the needed things into application context

[patrick_ibg]

yeah, but how do i invoke the bean on startup?

seems the @Startup annotation is appropriate for this, but without knowing anything about the dependencies, I'm loathe to use it :)