Glossary of Terms

Data binding used to bind UI widgets to data in the web-tier environment. The data objects can be located in various places throughout the web application:

• in the page flow controller class
• in container provided JSP implicit objects
• in NetUI framework-provided JSP implicit objects

More details about data binding can be found here.

Typically, a form bean is a server-side representation of the data in an HTML <form> tag. A form bean follows ordinary Java Bean syntax: each form bean is a class consisting of any number of properties, each property having a setter and a getter method associated with it. Form bean classes normally implement java.io.Serializable in order to facilitate persistence of form bean instances. The sample form bean below has two properties; each one has a getter and setter method associated with it.

public class ProfileFormBean 
    implements java.io.Serializable {

    private int age;
    private String name;

    public void setAge(int age) {
        this.age = age;
    }

    public int getAge() {
       return this.age;
    }
        
    public void setName(String name) {
        this.name = name;
    }

    public String getName() {
        return this.name;
    }
}               

Form beans are most often used to pick up data that is submitted from a <netui:form> tag. Once the POST data has been mapped to a form bean instance, the form bean is passed to a Page Flow action method. Note that form beans can be either standalone Java files or inner classes of a page flow controller.