What to do with the inner converter of view scoped backing bean

Question

Yet another problem among others with view scoped backing beans in JSF. I created an inner class in my view scoped backing bean. That inner class is converter. I need the inner class because I have to access some fields from my backing bean (list of select-one items in this case). Suddenly I figure out that my backing bean's @PostConstruct method is called after every request. After some inspection I realized that converter attribute is the problem and after some google search a find on (as always) BalusC's blog reason for this.

So, my question is how to make my converter to work fine, and also have my list of data which is necessary for conversion?

Answer 1

Decouple the converter into a stand alone class and use Application#evaluateExpressionGet() to access the view scoped bean instance inside the converter method.

ViewBean viewBean = context.getApplication().evaluateExpressionGet(context, "#{viewBean}", ViewBean.class);

This is however a bit nasty design. If I understand your concrete functional requirement of converting the selected item based on the list of available items right, an alternative is to use a generic converter which converts based on the physical <f:selectItem>/<f:selectItems> components. The JSF utility library OmniFaces has two converters for exactly this purpose, the SelectItemsConverter and SelectItemsIndexConverter.