Autocompletion of JSF/CDI Managed Beans in JBoss Tools

Current JBoss Tools 3.2 (Eclipse IDE plugin for developing Java EE web applications) is not yet able to show JSF 2.0 managed beans annotated with @ManagedBean.

For example, the code below will load just fine with JSF 2.0, but JBoss Tools will "ignore" it:

import javax.faces.bean.ManagedBean;

import javax.faces.bean.SessionScoped;

@ManagedBean(name="refillManager")

@SessionScoped

public class RefillManager {

When you type the following in the Facelets XHTML template editor, you will not get a code assist hint for refillManager bean :

<h:dataTable value="#{refillManager.refills}">

However there is an alternative, which is actually a better one anyway. (hint: why use JSF-only Managed Beans when you have CDI beans that you can use everywhere?)

Use CDI's @Named annotation :

import java.io.Serializable;

import javax.enterprise.context.SessionScoped;

import javax.inject.Named;

@SuppressWarnings("serial")

@Named("refillCdi")

@SessionScoped

public class RefillCdi implements Serializable {

Now this CDI bean will be detected by JBoss Tools and will show up in autocompletion popup.

To activate CDI (Java Context and Dependency Injection) in a Java EE 6 web application, create an empty file named WEB-INF/beans.xml and you're done. :-) JBoss Tools also has excellent support for CDI.