Binding a CheckBox control to a Bean in XPages

Question

In an XPage I have a CheckBox control bound to a property of a bean (called product). If I make that property a boolean like so..

private boolean selected = true;
public boolean isSelected() {
    return selected;
};
public void setSelected(boolean selected) {
    this.selected = selected;
};

and bind the checkbox using EL as #{product.selected) then the page initially opens fine but hangs on a partial refresh, however I can't see any errors in the logs.

If I add another wrapper getter/setter in the bean to return a text version like so:

public String getSelectedTxt() {
    return String.valueOf(selected);
}
public void setSelectedTxt(String selectedTxt) {
    selected = Boolean.parseBoolean(selectedTxt);
}

then bind the checkbox to #{product.selectedTxt} and make the uncheckedValue="false" and checkedValue="true". It works!

In version 9 it works straight against the boolean version without the need to convert to text.

So the question is does this sound like a bug in 8.5.3 with mapping checkbox controls to boolean values (has anyone done that before?), or am I approaching this the wrong way?

I'm surprised that it works in Notes 9, since the behavior all along in Notes was for checkbox values to be stored as strings. So, no, I don't thing it was a bug in 8.5.3, but a new capability in Notes 9. — David Navarre
Thanks David. I think that assumes that the XPages controls are there purely to be bound to a notes document data source, which if so I completely understand why the checkbox needs to point at a string value. If there are there to be bound to any potential datasource such as beans then I would have expected the boolean value to work. I'll treat it as a new, and useful!, feature in Notes 9 and stick to Strings values when on earlier releases. Cheers! — Martin Holland

Peter Presnell Peter Presnell · Accepted Answer · 2013-04-03T18:38:08

Checkboxes are one of a range of options for displaying the contents of Notes fields of type "Keywords". Keywords are Text fields that have a finite set of values. While you may think of a Checkbox as being a Boolean control that was not their original purpose or intent. So I would not look upon the 8.5.3 implementation as a bug. If the 9.0 behavior has changed to support boolean values then that is good news.

Binding a CheckBox control to a Bean in XPages

1 Answers