The Java EE 5 Tutorial

Using the selectItem Tag

The selectItem tag represents a single item in a list of items. Here is the example from Displaying a Menu Using the selectOneMenu Tag:

<h:selectOneMenu
       id="shippingOption" required="true"
     value="#{cashier.shippingOption}">
    <f:selectItem
        itemValue="2"
        itemLabel="#{bundle.QuickShip}"/>
    <f:selectItem
        itemValue="5"
        itemLabel="#{bundle.NormalShip}"/>
    <f:selectItem
        itemValue="7"
        itemLabel="#{bundle.SaverShip}"/>
 </h:selectOneMenu>

The itemValue attribute represents the default value of the SelectItem instance. The itemLabel attribute represents the String that appears in the drop-down menu component on the page.

The itemValue and itemLabel attributes are value-binding-enabled, meaning that they can use value-binding expressions to refer to values in external objects. They can also define literal values, as shown in the example selectOneMenu tag.