Let’s experiment with our current project. First of all, comment out the hidden binding of the secretWord component, so that we are able to see the initial value, perhaps like this:

<component id="secretWord" type="TextField">

    <binding name="value" value="theWord"/>

    <!--binding name="hidden" value="true"/-->

</component>

If you made any changes to how theWord property is configured, please revert now to the most convenient (and most often used) approach, an abstract getter. Now, if we want to give this property an initial value, we can use a relatively new feature of Java – an annotation. The result will look like this:

@InitialValue("literal:enter a word")

public abstract String getTheWord();

Simple and elegant, isn’t it? Run the project, and you should see something similar to the following screen shot:

Note that by default, the value inside of the double quotes inside the annotation is an OGNL expression. This means you can have a method providing an initial value for your property. Try something like this:

@InitialValue("initialValue")

public abstract String getTheWord();

public String getInitialValue() {

    return "enter a word";

}

Run the project, and it should work exactly as it did before.

But what if we wanted to configure this property in the page specification only? Let’s try this. Comment out the above abstract getter, its annotation and the getInitialValue() method (if you created it). Instead, add the following line of XML to the Home page specification:

<property name="theWord" initial-value="literal:enter a word"/>

Again, run the project, and it should work exactly as before.

Finally, if you had to configure a property by hand, here is one possible approach to assigning it an initial value:

public String getTheWord() {

    if (theWord == null) theWord = “enter a word";

    return theWord;

}

However, the more fundamental way to initialize a property is to override the finishLoad() method of the BasePage class:

protected void finishLoad() {

    theWord = “enter a word";

}

This method will be invoked only once, when the page is loaded for the first time.

All right, this seems to be everything I wanted to tell you about the properties of Tapestry pages for now. We have made some changes to the GuessTHeWord project, but that was for learning purposes only. You might want to revert the code to its initial state, undoing any changes we have made in this part of tutorial.

What comes next

In the next part, we are going to take a more detailed look at listener methods. They can be written in a few different ways and we are going to decide when each of the approaches can be useful for us, thus gradually expanding our Tapestry toolbox.

If the space will allow, we might also try different ways of submitting a form, but on the other hand, this might be delayed until a later part.

See you in a week.