get a bean to populate itself

[David J Smith]

I have a bean class lets say called UserBean. I also have a class (Utils) that contains a method returning a UserBean let say Utils.getUser. Is it possible to use this method inside a UserBean object to populate itself. I.e to do what line 11 is trying to do below.

public class UserBean {

  private String dn = null;
  private String firstname = null;
  private String surname = null;
  private String fullname = null;
  private String fetch = null;

  public getFetch() {
    Util util = new Util();
    this = util.getUser();
  }

    

Instead of having to write

UserBean user = util.getUser();

this.dn = user.dn;
this.firstname = user.firstname;
this.surname = user.surname;
this.fullname = user.fullname;

What I want to do is use UserBean in a jsp but I need to populate that bean with information that I get from the Utils class (in this example data from LDAP).

[Danilo Dadonas]

Hi David. In this case you're trying to clone a bean. You can implement the Cloneable interface, like this:

   
public class UserBean implements Cloneable{  

    ....
    
    public UserBean clone() throws CloneNotSupportedException{
        UserBean userClone = null;
        userClone = (UserBean ) super.clone();
        return userClone;
    }        

}

...and now you can do this:

    

public static void main(String args[]){
    UserBean user = //user from a database for example
    UserBean clone = user.clone();
}

Dadonas

[Bear Bibeault]

More of a genera Java question than a JSP one... so moved to a more appropriate locale.

[David J Smith]

Thanks for your reply but the problem is, I want it to populate itself, not just create a new object. Reason being, I want the UserBean object to be a session bean in my jsp. So as I see it, I have to declare the <jsp:usebean> and then populate the data in the bean. How can I use the method I have created in my Utils class (which returns a UserBean) to populate this session bean?

Thanks