One of the questions that is often raised when discussing Java EE integration (JSR-299 and EJB) is how to get a reference to a container-managed resource from within a JSF listener (e.g., EJB session bean, BeanManager, EntityManager). While Java EE certainly provides mechanisms to lookup up a resource, such as through JNDI, I think we need to restate the question at hand. Why is it that JSF listeners don't support Java EE resource injection like managed beans. Requiring this functionality in a Java EE environment would go a long way towards making JSF extensions (such as Seam or ADF) portable and generally make the effort of integration w/ container-managed resources easier.

With that said, I would like to propose for the next rev of the JSF specification that listeners, in addition to managed beans, support container injection and life-cycle callbacks when JSF is run in a Java EE environment (the rule for servlet containers would parallel that of managed beans today).

Listeners include:

PhaseListener
SystemEventListener
BehaviorListener? (not sure)

So the easiest way to do this would be to accept an expression any time a listener is declared, correct? This is possible today with the <f:view> tag for PhaseListeners, but not in faces-config.xml. In the other cases, we do have support for expressions.

-Dan

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Dan Allen
Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat | Author of Seam in Action
Registered Linux User #231597

http://mojavelinuxcom
http://mojavelinux.com/seaminaction
http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/Dan