SelectBooleanCheckbox and Y/N mapping

[nickarls]

Not exactly an Seam issue but I wonder how you have tackled similar problems:

How can I bind a SelectBooleanCheckbox to a String field ("Y" or "N")? I tried writing a converted but it didn't fire correctly. Well, I read that according to the JSF spec, it shouldn't even. And there is no truevalue/falsevalue properties available, either :-/

I tried to do the conversion in the setter/getter but that interfered with both the validation and the loading from db.

Is there a prettier solution than adding a dummy boolean setter/getter alongside the real one in the entity?

[pmuir]

You need to write a converter ;) I think you want to return "true" and "false" as the String.

[nickarls]

The problem is that such a converter doesn't get called (e.g. discussion on http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=500387)

[pmuir]

Ok, then as Adam says this is a bug in the spec (IMO). I don't know about your data model, but if you can alter the entity bean to have booleans, then you can use hibernate to map these back to strings in the database.

[smithbstl]

Pete, I am interested in this as well, specifically mapping Boolean in entities to non-boolean database fields (Oracle, ugh). I have Boolean represented in Oracle as non-null 1's and 0's. I have read that you can use Hibernate query substitutions to get around this problem, is this what you are referring to in your previous post or is there some other way?

Thanks

[pmuir]

I was talking about hibernate user types. Hibernate actually has built in usertypes for a few different ways of representing true/false

[nickarls]

public class ZeroOneType extends CharBooleanType {

 protected final String getTrueString() {
 return "1";
 }
 protected final String getFalseString() {
 return "0";
 }
 public String getName() { return "zero_one"; }

}

Yep, I'm currently trying out something like the above with a
@Type(type=foo.ZeroOneType) annotation. Lets see how it works out.

I've come to the conclusion with all converters etc that my domain objects have some traces of legacy-db-reverse-engineering. I'm now working towards making them more natural (booleans are booleans, enums are enums)...

[pmuir]

Exactly, this is, IMO, the "right" way to do it. You want your domain model as represented by entity beans to be "correct", and use hibernate to map it to your legacy schema. You should just use JSF converters for converting from the correct model to display and back.