I'm quite new to JavaServer Faces (v2.0), so I'm currently trying to teach myself by creating a XHTML page containing a table of data taken from my database.

The way I do this is to return an ArrayList to the data table value. This works fine if I call my method which populates the ArrayList from the result set, above the return statement.

The problem with this is that for each row of data, the table seems to recall the getter, which I think means it will call the worker which processes the result set, making it quite inefficient as it consists of a loop.

I'm wondering, without using JSP's, how do you call just worker methods inside the XHTML page? I've tried just writing #{mybean.mymethod} without adding the method call in the ArrayList getter and it just returns an empty table.

Note: By worker method, I just mean a void method which processes the result set into the ArrayList of objects.