Why is a CDI Managed Bean in faces-config.xml not registered as an obersver?

Question

I have implemented a CDI Bean which is observing events from another bean:

@SessionScoped
public class FixedItemController implements Serializable {
    ....
     public void onWorkflowEvent(@Observes WorkflowEvent workflowEvent) throws AccessDeniedException {
        logger.info("evaluate event...");
        ....
    }
    ....
}

This works fine as long as I am using the bean in a JSF page with its default name 'fixedItemController'.

But if I declare another instance of that bean in the faces-config.xml like this:

 <managed-bean>
        <managed-bean-name>myOrderItemController</managed-bean-name>
        <managed-bean-class>org.imixs.marty.workflow.FixedItemController</managed-bean-class>
        <managed-bean-scope>session</managed-bean-scope>
        <managed-property>
            <property-name>childItemProperty</property-name>
            <property-class>java.lang.String</property-class>
            <value>_orderItems</value>
        </managed-property>
    </managed-bean>

the second instance (myOrderItemController) is not registered automatically as an observer for my WorkflowEvent.

What can I do, to ensure that my second instance - declared by the faces-config.xml - will be immediately instantiated and registered as an observer to my workitemEvent?

Answer 1

faces-config.xml does not register CDI managed beans. It registers JSF managed beans. Effectively, your #{myOrderItemController} is a JSF managed bean. It's like as if you use @ManagedBean instead of @Named. The JSF bean management facility does not scan for CDI specific @Observes annotation.

Keep it a CDI managed bean. Whatever you tried to solve for which you thought that registering it in faces-config.xml would be the right solution has to be solved differently using the CDI API instead of the JSF API.