Creating Form with container of one-to-many

Vaadin 6 / 7 / 8 Framework Data Binding
1

Hi Folks,

I’m trying to create some Form’s to edit an object which contains one-to-many attributes. e.g.


Entity(name = "Person")
public class Person extends ModelCore {
    @Basic(optional = true)
    private String	    firstName    = null;

    @Basic(optional = true)
    private String	    lastName     = null;

    @OneToMany(cascade = { CascadeType.ALL }, orphanRemoval = true, targetEntity = Address.class)
    @OrderColumn()
    @JoinColumns({ @JoinColumn() })
    private List<Address>     addresses    = new ArrayList<Address>();
}

@Entity(name = "Address")
public class Address extends ModelCore {

    @Basic(optional = true)
    private AddressType type       = AddressType.WORK;

    @ManyToOne(cascade = { CascadeType.ALL, CascadeType.PERSIST,
	    CascadeType.REFRESH }, optional = true, targetEntity = Country.class)
    @JoinColumns({ @JoinColumn() })
    private Country     country    = null;

    @Basic(optional = true)
    private String      address1   = null;

    @Basic(optional = true)
    private String      address2   = null;

What’s the best way of creating one or more Form’s to edit such data?

If I use the jpacontainer-demo as an example I would guess I do something like:


        EntityItem<Person> person = ....;
        final Form generalForm = new Form();
        {
            generalForm.setCaption("General information");
            generalForm.setWriteThrough(true); // We use the buffering of the EntityItem instead
            generalForm.setFormFieldFactory(fieldFactory);
            generalForm.setItemDataSource(person);
            generalForm.setVisibleItemProperties(new String[]{"firstName",
                        "lastName",
                        });
            generalForm.setValidationVisible(true);
            addComponent(generalForm);
        }

        for (Address addr : person.getAddresses()) {
           Form billingForm = new Form();
        
            billingForm.setCaption(" Address");
            billingForm.setWriteThrough(true); // We use the buffering of the EntityItem instead
            billingForm.setFormFieldFactory(fieldFactory);
            billingForm.setItemDataSource(person);
            billingForm.setVisibleItemProperties(new String[]{"????.address1",
                        "????.address2",});
            billingForm.setValidationVisible(true);
            addComponent(billingForm);
        }

I’m not sure how to specify the values for setVisibleItemProperties() in the getAddresses() case. Is this even the right approach?

Alternatively I was thinking of implementing my own Forms independent of the JPAContainer and then saving the changes back to the datastore via my own DAO and then somehow notifying JPAContainer of the update. Not sure how to get JPAContainer() to recognize one of it’s managed objects has changed outside of it’s control, though.

Any suggestions/comments on either approach?

Thanks.

mike

2

Hi Folks,

Would really appreciate any advice you might have on this one. It’s a major roadblock for me right now.

Thanks.

mike

3

Hi,

I can’t say directly how to do that with JPAContainer as I haven’t tried that with it, but with regular beans you can do one-to-many mapping in a form
this way
. I hope that helps.

4

Moved the thread to data bindings. I’ll remove the double posting (see
this note about double posting
).

Regarding JPAContainer, notice that its manual is now
part of Book of Vaadin
.

5

Marko,

Thank you very much! I will get the nested form approach from the example you pointed out a try!

  • mike