Thread: JSF: Dynamically building SelectItems

Hi Guys and gals,

I have been banging my head against this wall for a couple days and am coming up to the stage where I just put in an ugly work around, but I would rather solve it and learn something, so any help would be very much appreciated.

I need to dynamically populate a h:selectManyListbox, I am using the f:selectItems linked to an array list of selectItem 's on my backing bean, as follows:

<h:selectManyListbox styleClass="selectManyListbox" id="avaliableProgs">
     <f:selectItems value="#{pc_EditProgrammeMatrix.availableProgrammes}"/>
</h:selectManyListbox>

(cutdown) Page code to populate the Select Items:

public ArrayList<SelectItem> getAvailableProgrammes(){
    ProgrammeLite currentProgrammeLite;
    Iterator avilableIterator = getProgrammeHandler().getAllProgrammeLites().iterator();
 
    this.availableProgrammes.clear();
 
    while(avilableIterator.hasNext()){
        currentProgrammeLite = (ProgrammeLite) avilableIterator.next();
        this.availableProgrammes.add(new SelectItem((Integer) currentProgrammeLite.getID(), currentProgrammeLite.getTitle()));		
    }
 
    return this.availableProgrammes;
}

This populates the SelectItems, allowing me to iterate through them, printing their value and label to the console. When returned to the JSF, the selectManyListbox is empty.


To test this, I manually populated the SelectItems array:

public ArrayList<SelectItem> getAvailableProgrammes(){
    this.availableProgrammes.add(new SelectItem((Integer) 1, "Hello");
    this.availableProgrammes.add(new SelectItem((Integer) 2, "World");
    return this.availableProgrammes;
}

This works correctly and displays the SelectItems.

I think this may have something to do with the JSF life cycle, but I am unable find a solution.

Any suggestions, help, or appropriate work around would be very much appreciated. Let me know if you need more info, etc.

The pagecode (EditProgrammeMatrix) is request; and it is retreiving data from ProgrammeHandler, which is session.

It turned out to be a JSF Lifecycle issue. I have resolved it by creating a new page dedicated to organizing the programmes. Not ideal, it at least it works.