c:set for bean properties - jsf

Question

I'm looking for some piece of code for setting a property in a JSF managed bean. My first idea was something like that:
<c:set var="#{loginBean.device}" value="mobil"></c:set>
That means I want to set the attribute device to the value "mobil" without a button have to been clicked.

Answer 1

Yes, you can use c:set for this purpose.
<c:set value="mobil" target="#{loginBean}" property="device" />
Doc: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17802_01/j2ee/javaee/javaserverfaces/2.0/docs/pdldocs/facelets/c/set.html
However, setting a static value rarely makes sense. You might consider to set a default value directly in your managed bean class. Also in terms of maintainability since you can handle constants better in the Java code than in the view layer.

Answer 2

I think you want the JSF tag child tag setPropertyActionListener. You can set this as a child tag in any ActionComponent.
<h:anyActionComponent id="component1">
<f:setPropertyActionListener target="#{loginBean.device}" value="mobil" />
</h:anyActionComponent>
UPDATE:
I originally misunderstood the users problem. They have a page, and they want a property to be set when the page loads. There is a couple ways to do this, but both are a little different. If you want to set a property to a value after every postback then you can use the #PostConstruct annotation on a ManagedBean method.
#PostConstruct
public void initializeStuff() {
this.device = "mobil";
}
Now if I have a ViewScoped or SessionScope bean that needs to be initialized with a default value just once when the page loads then you can set a phase lifecycle event that will run after every postback and check to see if the page should be initialized or not.
mah.xhmtl:
<f:event listener="#{loginBean.initialize()}" type="preRenderView" />
LoginBean:
public void initialize() {
if (this.device == null)
this.device = "mobil";
}

Answer 3

I am not able to Comment: If you need the value to be ready on page on load, you could use Managed Bean to directly initialize value or use its constructor or #PostConstruct to do the same.
#ManagedBean
#ResquestScoped
public class LoginBean {
private String device = "some value";
//Using Constructor
public LoginBean() {
device = getvalueFromSomewhere();
}
//Using PostConstruct
#PostConstruct
public void init() {
device = getvalueFromSomewhere();
}
}

Answer 4

Instead of setting the value in the xhtml file you can set via another ManagedBean. For instance if you have managedBean1 which manages page1.xhtml and managedBean2 which manages page2.xhtml. If page1.xhtml includes page2.xhtml like:
<ui:include src="page2.xhtml"/>
in managedBean1 you can have at the top
#ManagedProperty(value = "#{managedBean2}")
private ManagedBean2 managedBean2;
and in the PostConstruct
#PostConstruct
public void construct() {
managedBean2.setProperty(...);
}
worked for me anyway...