I used seam-gen from 1.1.6 GA to create a reverse-engineered project. I have a table with a self join. (Note that in order to use generate-entities, I had to drop the foreign key constraint, then I doctored the generated project a bit to restore the object relationship.) My entity looks something like:

@Entity
public class Currency implements Serializable
{
 private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;

 /** ISO 4217 Currency Code */
 @Id
 @Column(columnDefinition = "char(3)", length = 3)
 @NotNull
 @Length(min = 3, max = 3)
 private String code;

 /** Currency name (English) */
 @Column(length = 40, nullable = false, unique = true)
 @NotEmpty
 @Length(max = 40)
 private String name;

 /** Rank for sorting */
 @Column(nullable = false)
 @NotNull
 private int sortRank;

 /**
 * Replacement Currency. For example pre-Euro currencies would have EUR specified.
 */
 @ManyToOne
 private Currency replacementCurrency;

 /**
 * Replacement Date is the date that the currency was replaced. For example,
 * the date when the currency was converted to EUR.
 */
 @Temporal(TemporalType.DATE)
 private Date replacementDate;
...
}

So on the CurrencyEdit.xhtml page, there is code like:

 <tr class="prop">
 <td class="name">Replacement Currency</td>
 <td class="value">
 <s:decorate>
 <h:inputText id="replacementCurrency"
 size="3"
 maxlength="3"
 value="#{currencyHome.instance.replacementCurrency}"/>
 </s:decorate>
 </td>
 </tr>

Of course, when I try to save, I get an argument type mismatch error:

CurrencyEdit.xhtml @85,96 value="#{currencyHome.instance.replacementCurrency}": Exception setting property replacementCurrency of base with class com.mycompany.reference.iso.Currency, Bean: com.mycompany.reference.iso.Currency, property: replacementCurrency, argument type mismatch

The form only is accepting a String, which is the PK of Currency, but not a Currency object. Clearly, I need to use that String key to find the object instance, and then assign that to the object being edited... Anybody have an example?

I can imagine the code to do this, but I am really wondering what the best practice is. Can I use the CurrencyHome or CurrencyList object in some fashion, or do I need to create another bean?

(I am a little surprised that I couldn't find an example in the Seam documentation.)