Transient variables are not captured properly on form submission

Question

My User entity class have several member variables (e.g. String firstName) which are persisted and some transient variables (e.g. transient boolean selected) which are not.

I have used the transient variable to capture a checkbox selection, but invariably the value never gets set and procesed properly until I set another bean value along with it.

i.e. If User has firstName (mapped to a text field) and selected (mapped to a checkbox) If I just selected the value doesn't seem to be set on an update If I had selected the checkbox and the firstName field, the "selected" value is captured properly

Can anyone tell me why this is happening?

@Entity @Table(name = "User") 
public class User implements Serializable { 

    @Id @GeneratedValue(strategy = IDENTITY) 
    @Column(name = "id", unique = true, nullable = false, insertable = false, updatable = false) 
    private Integer id; 

    @Column(name = "first_Name") 
    private String firstName; 

    @Transient private boolean selected; // getters and setters 
} 

            <rich:dataTable value="#{users}" var="_user" style="width:auto;">
...
                <rich:column>
                    <f:facet name="header">Select</f:facet>
                    <h:selectBooleanCheckbox value="#{_user.selected}"/>
                </rich:column>
            </rich:dataTable>

Answer 1

We just saw a workaround to this issue. We were able to capture the value of the selected variable in our action classes (e.g. EntityQuery) but it didn't work in the @PreUpdate methods exposed by the entity. This seems to work fine now.