Web Bean Characteristics

Any class implementing the WebBean interface is a Web Bean. Web Beans have three fundamental characteristics:

• They are Web Components and therefore inherit the characteristics of WebComponents.  

• They and their underlying data can be rendered by Transform objects.  

• They can persist their state into and restore their state from a string that can, in turn, be passed across multiple requests.

Each of these characteristics comes from each of three interfaces that WebBean extends, all of which are discussed in this section:  WebComponent, Transformable, and RequestPersistable.

Thus, a WebBean object is a Web Component that is Transformable and Persistable.

Recall that the MicroStrategy Web application uses two types of Beans: Web Beans and Application Beans. While different Application Beans provide varying degrees of flexible functionality like that of Web Beans, Applications Beans are generally not WebBeans. While some Application Beans may be rendered by transforms, many others (e.g. GridFormatEditorBean and ObjectBrowserBean) are self-rendering. Additionally, Application Beans are not necessarily WebComponents and not necessarily Persistable.