Should I bean this?

[Rob Micah]

I have a SessionScoped ManagedBean that holds an ArrayList of a custom class. In my facelet I reference this custom class in components. I previously had this custom class defined as a sub-class of my bean:

@SessionScoped
@ManagedBean
public class MyBean
{
  private ArrayList<CustomClass> list;

  public ArrayList<CustomClass> getlist() { return this.list; }
  public void setlist(ArrayList<CustomClass> l) { this.list = l; }

  public class CustomClass
  {
    private String value = null;

    public String getvalue() { return this.value; }
    public void setvalue(String s) { this.value = s; }
  }
}

But the codebase for the custom class is getting complex and so I moved it to its own file. This appears to work. So my question is should I have declared this custom class as a bean since it has get/set methods and if so how would I instantiate it in my SessionScoped bean class since this will be inside a List?

[Tim Holloway]

CustomClass is a bean (POJO), and always has been a bean, although perhaps not literally a POJO, since it was an embedded class.

I think what you're asking is should it be a Managed Bean. And the answer to that is no.

A Managed Bean isn't a class, it's a unique instance of a class, accessible by name and constructed automatically by JSF.

Since CustomClass is not being used as a single unique instance - instead you have an entire collection of CustomClass objects, the bean management mechanisms would only apply if you went to the not-inconsiderable effort of adding a whole lot of managed CustomClass instances to your faces-config file (Annotations can't deal with multiple instances), and then fed the references to all those instances to the target bean's constructor as a managed collection property. Which is probably not going to be flexible enough for most purposes.