Best practice: pre/post population of Entities

[gzoller]

Hello,

I'd value people's input on the best practice for the following:

I have an Entity Foo. Some of Foo's fields are bound to form fields on a page (a seam-gen create page in this example).

Before showing the page to the user I want to create a Foo instance and pre-populate some of Foo's fields from the context (eg. logged-in user name). Then the user will populate most of Foo's fields like normal using the form bindings. Finally I want to post-populate some Foo fields after the user submits the form but before continuing to the next page.

I started playing with this and found myself delving into some weird hacks, so I'm 99% sure I'm going the wrong way. :-~

Thoughts?
Greg

[pmuir]

My approach:

Pre: If you are using EntityHome, then do it in the createInstance method (take a look at the docs).

Post: Do it in an action method.

[gavin.king]

Lots of options:

createInstance() method of EntityHome
page action with @Out
@Factory method

etc.