[jboss-user] [JBoss Seam] - User Navigation Design Pattern

[Delphi's Ghost]

I have an edit page for a widget, and each widget has a set of sub widgets. I want to show the widget details as editable inputTexts, and have a clickable list of subwidgets. If you click on a subwidget, you go to a page to edit the subwidget, click save on the subwidget page, and it should save the subwidget, and take you back to the widget edit page. On the widget edit page, you can finish editing the widget, click save, and it will save the widget. 

I'm finding this hard to do in seam, since the entity manager flush mode is set to manual, and obviously, when I flush it for the subwidget, it also flushes it for the widget itself which I don't want. 

I'm wondering whether a) I can do this in seam, or b) I'm still thinking in desktop client/server mode and need to adapt my ideas of user interaction to adapt to the web, for which seam is most suited.

Regarding option A, I'm wondering whether I need to do something along the lines of starting a nested conversation, and trying to get a new entity manager. I have tried to put the subwidget editor into a separate nested conversation, but it appears not to work since it shares the entity manager (I'm using the @In EntityManager entityManager seam managed transactional entity manager).

For option B, I can see that my current problem is that I am trying to have 2 different 'editors' in the same conversation space, and I can't pick and choose which one I want to flush. This leads me to think my interface design is wrong. We are inexperienced web developers and still thinking in client/server mode.

As an alternative navigation/interface design, I'm thinking of a 'view widget' page which lets you see the details as view only, with a link to edit the details. The view only page also has the clickable list of subwidgets which takes you to a page to edit the subwidget. The navigation would then revolve around the view details page, and you can only edit one item (widget or subwidget) at a time and go back to the view details page each time after saving the item. With this design, I don't think I will have any problems implementing it in Seam. This also gives me the benefit of having a page with view only access that the user cannot edit, and I can check rights to see if they can edit the widget/subwidgets. I also notice that this is similar to the style that seam-gen uses when it generates the crud pages. 

Anyone's experience or thoughts on this would be most welcome.



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