Select item from table and convertEntity

[brachie]

Hi,

I have a use case to implement which could normally done with a <h:selectOneMenu> and <s:convertEntity />.
Imagine you have a project editing page where I can set the manager of a project. Normally this could be done with a drop-down list like:

<h:selectOneMenu value="#{project.manager}">
 <s:convertEntity />
 <s:selectItems value="#{allPersons.resultList}"
 var="person"
 label="#{person.name}"/>
</h:selectOneMenu>

So the <s:converEntity/> will automatically converts the selected person and set it to my project (project hast a setManager(Person p) method).

But what if the data-list (here: allPersons.resultList) is too big to show it in the drop-down list? Let's say the list has 100000 entries.. In this case a popup should appear where I can search for persons, see the results in a table where I can select one to set for the project.
How could I accomplish that? Is there a way to use the <s:convertEntity> here or would I need to grab the id of the selected person manually and set it to the entity before saving it?

I think this is a common use case in real-world applications, so maybe one of you can give me a hint on how to implement it with Seam/JSF possibilities.

Thanks,

Alexander

[nickarls]

Well, you could have two separate components:

* selectOneMenu rendered when list.count < n

* separate modal window with datatable, paginator, search and filtering

I think you should be able to get both options working with a list of entities in the model. Then there is the question on how you should trigger the modal window. A separate button? An empty selectOneMenu with some sort of "on open trigger"?

[brachie]

"nickarls" wrote:
Well, you could have two separate components:

* selectOneMenu rendered when list.count < n

* separate modal window with datatable, paginator, search and filtering

I think you should be able to get both options working with a list of entities in the model. Then there is the question on how you should trigger the modal window. A separate button? An empty selectOneMenu with some sort of "on open trigger"?

I would have a little icon next to the input field which will trigger the popup with the person-selection table.
My main concern is not how to trigger the popup etc, it is how do I set the selected person directly to the entity (pass it to the project.setManager(Person p) method!

What I tried is (this is the person-select table in the popup):

<tr:table styleClass="trTableDiv" id="personss"
 rows="10" columnClasses="col"
 value="#{allPersons}" var="pers">
 <tr:column>
 <f:facet name="header">Name</f:facet>
 <h:outputText
 value="#{pers.vorname} #{pers.nachname}" />
 </tr:column>
 <tr:column>
 <f:facet name="header">select</f:facet>
 <a:commandLink reRender="panelProjekt" action="#{projekt.setManager(pers)}" value="set">
 <s:conversationId />
 </a:commandLink>
 </tr:column>
</tr:table>

The problems here are the following:
- only the last person in the table is set to the project if I click a link. Why??
- the project record is immediately updated in the DB after I click the link (maybe here I could use flushMode="manual"?)
- this only works for the first click on the commandLink

Any help would be appreciated.

Alexander

[nickarls]

tried using a s:link?

[brachie]

So I figured it out: The Trinidad table is the problem here. If I use the standard h:dataTable or rich:datatable it works!!

<rich:dataTable styleClass="trTableDiv" id="personss" value="#{allePersonen}" var="pers">
 <rich:column>
 <f:facet name="header">Name</f:facet>
 <h:outputText
 value="#{pers.vorname} #{pers.nachname}" />
 </rich:column>
 <rich:column>
 <f:facet name="header">select</f:facet>
 <a:commandLink immediate="true" reRender="panelProjekt" action="#{projekt.setManager(pers)}" value="set">
 <s:conversationId />
 </a:commandLink>
 </rich:column>
</rich:dataTable>

So here we have another little incompatibility with Trinidad?

But what happens when I click the set link is that the project record is immediately updated in the database. Is there a way to prevent this or do I have to set the flushMode of the conversation to manual?

[nickarls]

I think that is the expected behaviour and manual flushmode should fix that.

[brachie]

Ok, thanks for your help! It works like I want it now :-)

But can anyone explain to me what happens behind the scene when passing the entity-object (pers in my example) directly as method parameter? Well, it works, but how?

Alexander