Creating Content Beans

Introduction

To make custom document types available in a site the backing JCR nodes must be wrapped in a HippoBean object. A Content Bean is a light-weight wrapper around such a node and a simple POJO. For a request, you can access the Content Bean mapped to the requested page via

HstRequestContext ctx = RequestContextProvider.get();
ctx.getContentBean()

See HstRequestContext documentation for more information.

For a typical document type created using the Document Type Editor, the corresponding content bean class can be auto-generated using the Beanwriter tool. However, in some cases it might be necessary to customize the generated class, or write one from scratch.

Document Type

For the mapping to work it must be annotated with the org.hippoecm.hst.content.beans.Node annotation. Set the mapped JCR node type with the jcrType parameter.

@Node(jcrType="myhippoproject:textdocument")
public class TextDocument extends HippoDocument{ ... }

Read the page about Automatic Scanning to see how to enable the actual scanning of the Bean.

Primitive Fields

To make the properties of the JCR node available in components and templates the bean must have appropriate getters. The return type of the getter for a property depends on the type of it.

An example of a typical getter for a property is:

public String getTitle() {
    return getProperty("myhippoproject:title");
}

Here is a list of Primitve fields as defined in the Document Type Editor in the CMS, the matching JCR property type and the corresponding types in Java.

Compound Fields

For compound types in document types the information is stored in JCR as child nodes of the documents' node. The getter in the document Bean should then return the Bean type that maps the content of the child node.

Some examples of typical getters for compound type fields are:

public HippoBean getRelatedDocument() {
    return getLinkedBean("myhippoproject:relateddocument", HippoBean.class);
}

public List<HippoGalleryImageSet> getImages() {
    return getLinkedBeans("myhippoproject:images", HippoGalleryImageSet.class);
}

public HippoHtml getDescription() {
    return getHippoHtml("myhippoproject:description");
}

For custom compounds you must write your own beans. For the compounds provided by Hippo these are the corresponding beans.

Prevent the Beanwriter from Modifying Custom Bean Methods

Even if a project contains custom content bean classes, the Beanwriter can still be useful. For example, to generate bean classes for newly added document types, or even to generate methods for fields added to existing document types. However, care must be taken to not let the Beanwriter modify any existing methods in existing bean classes.

To prevent the Beanwriter from making any modifications to a method in a bean class:

• Add the @HippoEssentialsGenerated annotation to the method.
• Set the annotation's internalName parameter to the JCR property name of the field.
• Set the annotation's allowModifications parameter to false.

Example:

@HippoEssentialsGenerated(internalName = "myhippoproject:title", allowModifications = false)
public String getTitle() {
    return getProperty("myhippoproject:title");
}

You can also prevent the whole bean class from being modified by the Beanwriter by updating the class level annotation in the same way.

Persistence

Typically content beans only have getters and consequently are "read-only". If a document type is used to store content submitted by site visitors its content bean must support persistence.

To support persistence a content bean must have setters and in addition must implement the org.hippoecm.hst.content.beans.ContentNodeBinder interface.