The first part of the easy keyword bean can be found here

When working with keywords in XPages your application could greatly take advantage of the possibilities in the XPage Engine. Thru caching of data, What do I mean with caching?

Well today the keyword bean is located in viewScope and that means that it lives only on the current page that is opened. If you move the bean to applicationscope and add some caching functionality we only need to go into the database if the keyword never have been fetched before.

But there is a problem when moving things into applicationscope that is multi user access, and that can easily be solved using synchronization or threadsafe objects.

Another thing is that you need to maintain is keyword updates because they need to be maintained but that is also easy to solve because if you write the Keyword edit save using XPages that you can update the keyword when saving a keyword.

OK so how do we change the code so we get a common applicationscope keyword bean.

first we add a Global CacheObject and next we check against the GlobalCache Object before accessing the database. And we also need a recache option for a certain keyword to get it refreshed when you have saved a keyword.

Let’s Look at some code

we start by importing java.util.concurrent.ConcurrentHashMap and setting up the hasmap object as a cache object. I use the concurrenthashmap to get a threadsafe Cache object in my application scope bean.

We also need to change the object from static to be an ordinary Java object because it will live in the applicationscope. Another thing we also need to implement is serializable if the server want to store the object on disk for any reason.

Let’s move over to the getKeyword function. What we need to do is to check if the keyword is in cache and if it is, return the cached data. If it isn’t found get the data like before and store it in cache and return the data.

And because I call getKeword from the function getKeywordString I only need to change getKeyword when implementing this new functionality.

The last thing we need to add is the recache function, and that one will be a function that clears the data in cache so the next request to get the data will do it from the database.

I almost forgot, we need to change our managebean also and move if from viewScope to Application Scope in the faces-configt.xml file

If you want the full code for this check out this xSnippet on openntf.org

Flexibility in applications is always a great thing, to adapt the application to the business needs without recoding things. And if adding this flexibility can be done without lots of code, you will probably use it.

This is one way of creating a keyword data bean for you XPages.

Start by creating a form named Keyword, in this form add the fields Name and Data, add the multivalue checkbox in the datafield 

Save the form

Now you need to create the lookup view, create a view called byKeyword

Add 2 columns name and data. The name column should display the name of the Namefield and it must be sorted and the second view should show the data field, Save the new view.

Let move over to the interesting code, create a new java class named FormHelper and place it in a package, I call mine com.xpagedeveloper.

I create two functions, the first one will return return a vector with the data from the keyword.

And my Second function returns string from the array separated with a string of your choice

After I add the bean init setup in the faces-context.xml in the WebContent\WEB-INF folder from the package explorer.

Now it’s very simple to get keyword values to you fields and functions inside your XPages.

Create a Keyword using the Keyword form, in this case I’ve created a Keyword named Category and added some values to it.

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And in my XPage I have added an Combobox

And in the values tab click on the “Add Formula Item” button

And write the following code

 
If you want the full code for the bean, it can be found here as an xSnippet

Now your XPage application is more flexible without lots of code.