Shay Shmeltzer's Weblog

I got asked this today, and this seems to be a question that pops up every now and again, so I thought I'll document this little piece of code.

The scenario is that you have a drop down list using a selectOneChoice component on your page - and you want to find out the selected value in a backing bean.
For example the departmentId field in this page:

The first thing everyone try and do is to access the list component in a backing bean and invoke the getValue method on it. But then they realize that this only returns the actual index of the row that was selected and not the value.

The following little piece of code will get you that value.
What it does is access the bindings object, get the list binding, and then invoke the getSelectedValue method on it.

public void buttonPressed(ActionEvent actionEvent) {

// Get the binding
BindingContainer bindings =
BindingContext.getCurrent().getCurrentBindingsEntry();
// Get the sepecific list binding
JUCtrlListBinding listBinding =
(JUCtrlListBinding)bindings.get("DepartmentId");
// Get the value which is currently selected
Object selectedValue = listBinding.getSelectedValue();
System.out.println(selectedValue);
}

Note that the binding name I'm getting (DepartmentId) is the last one in this picture - see the list binding icon next to it.