Submitting Input Fields In a Datatable

[Eric Richer]

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to solve a problem which I would seem to think is quite intuitive to solve but just can't seem to get it going. Any suggestions you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

Basically, I have a managed bean in the request scope which contains a List<String>.

I create a datatable (actually its a RichFaces datatable) which iterates through the List above and creates an input text field for every entry. My problem is when I submit the form, the List in the managed bean is not updated and remains empty. I'm completely at a loss as to how to make this work. I've even tried binding the table to a back bean and iterating through the children of the HtmlDataTable object with no success. To make sure I am understanding things properly, I even added a simple input text field outside the datatable to make sure it was properly submitted.

Here is my page code:

 
<rich:dataTable id="id_cos" binding="#{searchResultsBean.tableRef}" value="#{searchResultsBean.results}" var="cos"
  <rich:column id="id_cosName">
    <f:facet name="header">
      <h:outputText value="COS" />
    </f:facet>
    <h:inputText  id="id_cosName" value="#{cos.name}"/>
  </rich:column>
</rich:dataTable>
   

Here is my managed-bean:

  
public class SearchResultsBean {

private List<ClassOfServiceBean> results;


public List<ClassOfServiceBean> getResults() {
    return results;
  }

  public void setResults(List<ClassOfServiceBean> results) {
    this.results = results;
  }
  
   

[Bertjan Underhill]

Hello,

First a comment, id is unique. So two times id="id_cosName" is not a good idea.

You can try to put the managed bean in session scope. Maybe that will work.

Bertjan

[Eric Richer]

Hey Bertjan,

The duplicate ID is just a spelling error. Putting the managed bean in session scope definately makes things easier. In the request scope though it is possible to make it work. I ended up getting the behaviour I want by accessing the parameter map in the HttpServletRequest and then manually populating the List. I'm guessing there isn't inherent support in the datatable for restoring a property of type List as the property's setter method is never even invoked.

Thanks for the input.

Cheers