How about <s:enumItems>?

[stephen]

<s:selectItems> is great to avoid having to create SelectItems in Java code.
However for select's based on enums there is no such convenience.You still have to create a method in a seam component that converts the enum values to SelectItems.

How about this:

<s:enumItems enumClass="com.acme.OrderType" var="orderType" label="#{msgs[orderType.name()]}"/>

I think that would fit nicely with Seam.
If that's ok, I am going to create a Jira issue and try to supply the code.

[wrzep]

You can use s:convertEnum tag to achieve this :)

-Pawel

[stephen]

Hi Pawel and thanks for the answer.

However either you missed the point of my request or I completely misunderstood s:convertEnum.

AFAICS s:convertEnum is simply a converter (using the enum object's name() as String representation). You still need to specify SelectItems and to do that you need Java code.

Currently:

@Name("factories")
public class Factories
{
   @Factory("orderTypes")
   public OrderType[] getOrderTypes{
      return OrderType.values();
   }
}

and

<s:selectItems value="#{orderTypes} ...

With my proposal you can get rid of the Java code and simply use:

<s:enumItems class="com.acme.OrderType" ...

As a side note: I found I so far never needed the s:convertEnum tag. When it is omitted, the index of the enum in the value list is used. I think that's just fine, because the ordering of enum items is stable (if you don't calculate them in a very funny way in java code).

For me the only open question is whether the s:enumItems approach is susceptible to class loader problems, as it would need to access the enum class using reflection (with the current thread's class loader?).

[stephen]

Hm, an alternative would be to add another function to Seam's EL functions that given the FQN would return a reference to a class:

<s:selectItems value="#{s:clazz(com.acme.OrderType).values()"} ...

That could be useful in other scenarios, too. Basically you would be able to call any public static method.