JSF - Accessing a SessionScoped managed bean

Question

I'm quite new in JSF and I'm doing some basic things to get a feeling of how one should work with it. In my one of the projects I have a ManagedBean, SessionScoped like below

@ManagedBean(name="user")
@SessionScoped
public class User implements Serializable
// Having a couple of String properties (with setters and getters).

Now, in one page in a form I have a <h:inputText id="firstName" value="#{user.firstName}" ... /> which I would expect to get a value from the user and put it in my bean's property. The second page just displays the input data, accessing it from the bean. (<h:outputText value="${user.firstName}"/>).

The problem is that if after that I go in a third page (just by typing the URL) and I'm trying to use the same line to display once again the data from the bean, no data gets displayed. I was expecting that while the bean is session scoped it should still be available in the current session.

Answer 1

This can have several causes which you really need to debug and exclude yourself as you're the only one who has instant access to the environment.

1. The bean has been recreated.
2. The bean has been removed.
3. The session has been invalidated.
4. The session has been timed out.
5. There's means of a different session.
6. There's means of a different context path.

To exclude 1 and 2, put a debug breakpoint in bean's default constructor and/or track the bean in the session map. To exclude 3, 4 and 5, track the value of HttpSession#getId(), eventually in JSP by ${pageContext.session.id}. To exclude 6, just ensure that the page is inside the same context (i.e. in the webcontent of the same project).

Answer 2

Make sure you are using import javax.faces.bean.SessionScoped, instead of javax.enterprise...;