ifNotBegunOutcome and non-action page loading

[andrew.rw.robinson]

Okay, I may be trying something unsupported, but I thought this was possible:

I have a stateful session bean and it is the backing bean for registering a new user. I don't want the user to hit the register page directly, but instead click a register link from another page. Therefore, I want to redirect the user to the "welcome" page if the conversation has not yet begun. So I declared my session bean as:

@Name("registerUser")
@Interceptors(SeamInterceptor.class)
@Stateful
@Conversational(ifNotBegunOutcome="welcome")
@Intercept(InterceptionType.ALWAYS)
public class RegisterNewUserAction
 implements RegisterNewUser, Serializable

When I go to the registerNewUser.jsf page, I get an error. Looking in the stack trace, it is because the register page is trying to access a variable that is out-jected by the above session bean. Some of the exception:

Caused by: org.jboss.seam.RequiredException: Out attribute requires value for component: registerUser.editingUser
 at org.jboss.seam.Component.setOutjectedValue(Component.java:874)
 at org.jboss.seam.Component.outjectFields(Component.java:852)
 at org.jboss.seam.Component.outject(Component.java:701)
...

I thought that as soon as any property is accessed of a conversational bean, the "ifNotBegunOutcome" should take over and force a navigation on my "welcome" outcome.

Am I missing something? (Is this not possible?)

Any advice on how to accomplish this would be appreciated. I will be wanting to do this with many pages (when the user hits a URL using a browser location -- not submitting a form -- in the middle of a conversation, they need to be redirected back to the first page of the conversation)

Thanks,
Andrew

[gavin.king]

Property access cannot trigger the ifNotBegunOutcome, because a property access does not have an outcome :)

Only action methods have outcomes.

[andrew.rw.robinson]

Is there a workaround? Could I cause a redirection on a property access using an interceptor? Could I tell from an interceptor if the accessed session bean has an active conversation or not?

[gavin.king]

i think the best approach is to use @Out(required=false)

[andrew.rw.robinson]

Tried that but I get errors later when using EL expressions to refer to child properties of my object which is of course null since the conversation method has not been invoked that creates my user object

[andrew.rw.robinson]

Okay, got a solution. I went back to using my "on-load" library from jsf-comp. For those interested, it is the "jsfExt" library at http://www.sf.net/projects/jsf-comp (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=137466&package_id=168611)

I added a method "validateInConversation" that checks for my variables being instantiated and then changed the @Out(required=true) to required=false. Seems to work well with Seam as long as my phase listener is registered after the seam phase listener.