var is the collection, not the item

Question

I'm looping through a collection of 'RSVP' objects and printing out the value of each one's 'Name' property like this

<p:dataTable id="rsvpDataTable" var="rsvp" value="#{eventController.event.rsvps}"...
   <h:outputText value="#{rsvp.name}" />
</p:dataTable>

But I get the error: The class 'org.hibernate.collection.internal.PersistentSet' does not have the property 'name'

If instead, I print out 'rsvp.class.name' to see what type it is, it is indeed a PersistentSet.

But why? It should be single RSVP instance from the collection.

If I debug the code and stop at getRsvps(), I can see that it's returning a PersistentSet containing my RSVP objects. RSVP has a bidirectional relationship back to Event. Would that be causing this?

I'm a bit suspicious about it being a PersistentSet too actually, I would have thought it would have been converted back to a normal 'Java' set by now, but maybe not.

Thanks

Answer 1

You can't iterate over a Set, and that's a JSF restriction for now. JSF 2.2 will be able to do it.

That said, you can convert it yourself or, what I would do, you can use OmniFaces #{of:setToList} EL function. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. :)

See also this answer by BalusC.

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As to the fact that Hibernate is returning a PersistentSet, that is just the way it works. Hibernate has it's own implementation of Set, so it can implement features like Lazy-Loading, etc.