f:selectItems and POJOs - once more

Question

All the questions asking: how can I bind POJOs to h:selectXX with f:selectItems end up with answer "use a converter". However, it seems it is possible to go without the converter - see:

Facelet:

<h:selectManyListbox value="#{pojoBean.selected}">
    <f:selectItems value="#{pojoBean.allItems}" var="i" itemValue="#{i}" itemLabel="#{i.txt}" />
</h:selectManyListbox>

Bean:

public class PojoBean {
    List<MyItem> selected;
    List<MyItem> allItems;

POJO:

public class MyItem {
    private String txt;
...}

Note that this seems to work only with h:selectManyListbox, when the value/s being selected end up in a list, not in a single property.

Question - why doesn't it work with h:selectOneMenu and etc?

Answer 1

Likely your MyItem class has already the toString() overridden which returns the txt and you were plain printing selected as follows to determine the selected values:

System.out.println(selected);

Try to cast each item of selected back to MyItem :

for (MyItem myItem : selected) {
    System.out.println(myItem);
}

You'll see that it fails with ClassCastException , because it's actually a String . So yes, you still need a converter here.

See also:

• How do I get selectManyCheckBox to return something other than List<String>?