I wanted to know if it is possible to have an inputText field that would display the initial value from a different bean then the one that the value is saved into.

I basically have a user that logs in and is saved into a bean called User. Later the user could want to change his profile, all this information is saved into a bean called Profile. However I would want the initial value in my form to be displayed from User.

I tried something like

@In(value="#{user.username}")
 private String username;

in my ProfileAction but I get an exception

In attribute requires value for component: #{user.username}

I am also injecting the User bean into it and tried to initialize the values in the constructor of ProfileAction but I get NullException. I know user is not Null because I am displaying information from it in one of my web pages.

Also tried to use managed beans in faces-config.xml but Seam is hidding the managed beans so that doesn't work either.