I would like to give you some context first.
The Context
I am currently developing a web application using Spring framework, where I would like to provide users with displaying/editing different instances of the same entity type of model in separate tabs. For displaying and retrieving attributes of these entities, I am using Spring managed beans with matching Data Transfer Object instances and with @Autowired annotated instances of service layer interface implementations for persisting the data.
Because I have experienced, that Spring's session scoped beans are not suitable for multi-tab editing and request scoped beans cannot hold the submitted data "long enough" for redisplay, I have implemented a "custom" scoped view beans. That seems to work fine for displaying and editing multiple same type pages (and entities on them) and for holding the data as long as the bean's action methods return void/null.
Navigating between pages is currently done by the String type return value of the destination page on the bean action methods send to the components like h:commandLink and h:commandButton to be resolved by JSF or by using simple html links.
The Problem
How do you navigate with one h:link/h:button to another page and ALSO pass it parameters to display by a Spring view scope bean after page landing?
Is there a way, how to redirect to another page at first -- for example from a page with list of system users, and then displaying details of a user passed from the launching page?
Questions to be answered and possible solutions?
If I have understood and implemented it correctly, they are already managed and injected with Spring, so they cannot work exactly as JSF's ViewScoped beans, so I cannot easily use their attributes annotated as JSF managed and pass them values of parameters for displaying them on a details/edit page AFTER navigating to it. When I try it, it results in a "CDI @ViewScoped bean functionality unavailable" error message. I think, that for the same reason using @ManagedBean annotated JSF beans and it's f:viewParam on destination page did not work. Is that correct?
I have tried passing parameter to Spring view scoped bean's function with return value of a destination page, but obviously(?) the bean gets recreated after landing on it with it's parameters emptied. Trying to define navigation rule for a Spring view scoped bean's action with the void return type and a landing page name also did not work. It seems like the Spring bean was not recognised in faces-config.xml. Is it so?
Should I use some longer-lived Spring bean's method for calling the view scoped one's constructor with the right parameters? But how do I prevent the view scoped bean's recreation after redirecting?
Switching from view scope to session scope would solve my problem, but it would result in a bad user experience as I see it and given, how my application should work with multiple tabs of the same type instances for the same user.
Passing and retrieving the secured parameters by a view scoped bean from the url address seems to me as maybe not the best security practice. But I am also using Spring Security roles in UI, service layer and url intercept as well as AOP on my service methods for checking the owner of retrieved data. Would be using some data identifier in the url be the only solution possibly working? Is it a worse/better solution from the point of security than using session scoped beans?
I welcome and thank you for every advice you could give me, because this is my first Spring pet project and I am learning on the way.
