Datatable: Link foreign keys to actual data

[Samson Mlati]

I have a datatable whose source is a table with some foreign keys in it. I would like to replace the foreign keys with a an entry from a column in the related table. Is there an easy way to do this?

[Tim Holloway]

One of the easiest to code (though not to setup) is to use an ORM. In that case, you can simply refer to embedded object properties. For example:

<h:outputText value="#{backingBean.invoice.header.text}"/>

Where the Object Model for invoice replaces the explicit foreign key with the object represented by the foreign key. But it does require that you ensure that the header object is loaded in time, since the default on most ORMs is lazy fetching. That's not all that hard to do, though.