Multipe managed beans with multiple xpages

Question

I might be an idiot here but I have a question regarding xpages and managed beans. I'm trying to separate logic and presentation by moving logic to a bean corresponding to an entity (a document more or less). I have a data-provider-class fetching and setting data. This is fine and all with one xpage but as the application gets more advanced with relations and multiple xpages I run into a problem (I'm looking at http://blog.mindoo.com/web/blog.nsf/dx/18.03.2011104725KLEDH8.htm?opendocument&comments#anc1 for inspiration).

If I'm not wrong I can't assign different managed beans to different xpages so setting different data-provider-classes and businesslogic-beans to different xpages can not be done in faces-config.xml. Now I might be going about this in the wrong way but any pointers is most appreciated.

Best regard Olof

Answer 1

Look at beans as "global variables", so you can have different functions by defining different names. For example: "invoice", "customer", "order", "orderItem" and so on. It's up to you.

Answer 2

You cant assign managed beans (as in define them in faces-config) for specific xpages ( as far is i know). They are application specific. I think you are looking for something like the factory pattern/creator pattern. These are design patterns used to create instances of a specific class. For more info see: Factory method pattern Wikipedia or Creational patterns wikipedia.

When you create for instance a pizzeria website you could have a factory to create specific types of pizza's depending the button you are pressing. Each pizza is then created in memory ( bean ) and used as the datasource of your custom control. When the customer is ready ordering the pizza is saved to a notesdocument ( saved state ) and transformed together with all other products orderd as an order for that customer.

Whenever you want to retrieve that particular pizza again (for instance when you want to check which pizza the customer has ordered) you only need to ask the factory if you can get pizza with number / ID and the factory will return that pizza from the notesdocument. Build once, use many.

So basically you don't have several managed beans per page but per application and you use them across your application wherever you need them.