JSF and Template Method design pattern - part II (JSF+CDI)

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JSF and Template Method design pattern - part I (plain code)

In this part, we will transform the application from first part from plain code into a JSF+CDI application. The biggest issue of this case is represented by the final method, PrinterTemplate#print(). For example, we may try to transform the concrete implementations (A1Printing and A4Printing) into CDI managed beans and invoke the print() method, as below:

@Named

@RequestScoped

public class A1Printing extends PrinterTemplate {

 @Override

 public void feedWithPaper() {

  System.out.println("Feed with paper A1 format.");

 }

 @Override

 public void alignMargins() {

  System.out.println("A1 margins top/0.5in, bottom/0.5in, left/0.2in, right/0.2in.");

 }

 @Override

 public void printStyle() {

  System.out.println("A1 print in grayscale.");

 }   

}

@Named

@RequestScoped

public class A4Printing extends PrinterTemplate {

 @Override

 public void feedWithPaper() {

  System.out.println("Feed with paper A4 format.");

 }

 @Override

 public void alignMargins() {

  System.out.println("A4 margins: top/1.0in, bottom/0.75in, left/0.75in, right/0.75in.");

 }

 @Override

 public void printStyle() {

  System.out.println("A4 print in colors.");

 }   

}

<h:form>

 <h:commandButton value="Print A4" action="#{a4Printing.print()}"/>                              

 <h:commandButton value="Print A1" action="#{a1Printing.print()}"/>                              

</h:form>

Or, we can try to use a separate CDI managed bean and pass the A1Printing/A4Printing instance via <f:setPropertyActionListener/>:

@Named

@RequestScoped

public class MyBean {

 private PrinterTemplate printer;

 public PrinterTemplate getPrinter() {

  return printer;

 }

 public void setPrinter(PrinterTemplate printer) {

  this.printer = printer;

 }

 public void printAction() {

  printer.print();

 }

}

<h:form>

 <h:commandButton value="Print A1" action="#{myBean.printAction()}">              

  <f:setPropertyActionListener target="#{myBean.printer}" value="#{a1Printing}" />

 </h:commandButton>

 <h:commandButton value="Print A4" action="#{myBean.printAction()}">              

  <f:setPropertyActionListener target="#{myBean.printer}" value="#{a4Printing}" />

 </h:commandButton>

</h:form>   

But, these approaches will not work because they will cause an error as:  WELD-001437: Normal scoped bean class template.method.PrinterTemplate is not proxyable because the type is final or it contains a final method public final void template.method.PrinterTemplate.print().

Practically, the CDI container will create proxy objects for injected classes. In order to provide a proxy object of the same type as the original object, CDI extends the original object (extend the class you want to inject). This is happening internally, so we may find "strange" the above exception. Since CDI provides us a proxy subclass of the bean, is pretty easy to intuit that this doesn't work very well with final methods/classes and private constructors (e.g. public final void template.method.PrinterTemplate.print()).If the class is not final (e.g. PrinterTemplate), the proxy can extend it, but cannot easily overwrite the final method PrinterTemplate#print().

Now, we can remove the final keyword from PrinterTemplate#print() method, but this will violate the template method design pattern concept, since subclasses will be able to override the print() method and alter the steps order.

So, a simple approach will consist in instantiating A1Printing/A4Printing in bean (MyBean):

@Named

@RequestScoped

public class MyBean {

 public void printA1Action() {

  PrinterTemplate printerA1 = new A1Printing();

  printerA1.print();

 }

 public void printA4Action() {

  PrinterTemplate printerA4 = new A4Printing();

  printerA4.print();

 }

}

<h:form>

 <h:commandButton value="Print A1" action="#{myBean.printA1Action()}"/>

 <h:commandButton value="Print A4" action="#{myBean.printA4Action()}"/>              

</h:form>

Obviously, this is not a very elegant approach! In order to keep everything in a single method, we can pass the printing type as argument:

@Named

@RequestScoped

public class MyBean {

  

 public void printAction(String type) {

  PrinterTemplate printer;

  if (type.equals("a1")) {

      printer = new A1Printing();

  } else {

      printer = new A4Printing();

  }

  printer.print();

 }

}

<h:form>

 <h:commandButton value="Print A1" action="#{myBean.printAction('a1')}"/>

 <h:commandButton value="Print A4" action="#{myBean.printAction('a4')}"/>              

</h:form>  

In the next part we will discuss about template method pattern in JSF implementation.