Get the ID/String Value for an LOV drop-down item though EL

In a previous post we looked at how to get the selected value or text from an LOV in our backing bean. While that approach is effective for most use-cases, there are some situations where you cannot use that approach , or using it is too cumbersome.In this post we'll look at a slightly different approach that can be used when you need to use the ID or String value in EL or you don't want to have a backing bean.

Needing to get the value in EL can be a common scenario when you are trying to extract the selected ID behind an LOV and pass it somewhere, like passing the ID to another bounded task flow. Very common use-case.

To consider an example, suppose you have an app built on the EMP and DEPT tables and you have an "Employee Edit" page. On this page, you have the department the employee belongs to, implmented as a drop down list of Departments ( LOV ). Now lets say you want to have an "Edit Dept" button next to the Department drop-down, which when clicked should take you to an "Edit Dept" page for the currently selected dept in the drop-down. This LOV drop-down on the "Edit Employee" page was created on the EMP VO, for the Dept ID attribute and would use a view-accessor on the EmpVO to map the Dept ID in the Emp Table with the Dept ID in the Dept table and pull the Dept name from that. What we need is the Department ID of the department selected in the drop-down so that we can pull up that department details in the "Department Edit" page when the user selects a department and clicks on "Edit Department".

The LOV when placed on a page, creates a list binding in the binding layer by default and as such is not very useful for us because it stores the index of the selected Item and not the underlying ID. The easiest method to get the current ID is to manually create an Attribute Binding in the pageDef that points to the DeptID on the same iterator that the list binding is pointing to. This means that when the user changes the selection in the LOV, the currency in the iterator will change and since the attribute binding is on the same iterator, the attribute binding will also change.

To get the value in EL, just refer to the attribute binding in EL and not the list binding .

Simple !

Sample application

I'm gonna re-use the sample application from the ADF Security Basics post.
http://myadfnotebook.googlecode.com/files/SecurityDemo.zip
In this application, there is a feature when editing an employee there is s a link go to the edit department page (from the employee detail page). This page has a drop down allowing you to select a department for the employee, but also a link on the side directly takes you to edit the selected department. This link is implemented using the approach described here.