How to tell JSF 2.0 in Glassfish to instantiate an CDI @Alternative to a <managed-bean>?

Question

We have a JSF 2.0 application running under Glassfish 3.1.1 which has been moved forward from JSF 1. This mean that I have a faces-config.xml saying

<managed-bean>
    <managed-bean-name>OnlineBeanHandler</managed-bean-name>
    <managed-bean-class>X.jsf.OnlineBeanHandler</managed-bean-class>
    <managed-bean-scope>session</managed-bean-scope>
            ...
</managed-bean>

which was done to allow using #{OnlineBeanHandler} in my facelet pages. Works well. I can also use @javax.inject.Inject inside OnlineBeanHandler to get a CDI managed bean which I can then provide an alternative for by marking it @javax.enterprise.inject.Alternative and enabling it in beans.xml. Works well.

Now I need to have the same mechanism working for OnlineBeanHandler itself - ie have the <managed-bean> -handling code invoke my alternative class instead of the one explicitly named, but when following the same steps, I still get my base class instead of my alternative.

Can this be done directly and if so how?

---

Apparently this mechanism does not work there. In the current situation, we could do with creating yet another faces-config.xml file and just have those to be overridden by projects there. A replacement faces-config.xml is then provided by each project.

Answer 1

Those two types of manages beans are exclusive. CDI Alternatives only work for CDI managed beans, not JSF manages beans. You could remove the XML snippet in faces-config and add @Named then you will be able to use @Alternative.