What is the "binding" property of controls and how do you use it?

Question

The "binding" basic property is described as a property that "Specifies an expression that binds a control to a particular control property". I tried to google and read at HCL docs but there is no example on how to use it.

Answer 1

The binding property allows you to specify an object property (say, on a managed bean or dataContext) that will be set to the specified component. For example, you could do:

<xp:inputText binding="#{someBean.textField}"/>

...and that would call someBean.setTextField(XspInputText inputText).

All that said, it's kind of an edge-case property. I've made good use of it, but it's largely an artifact of earlier JSF revisions, when it was more common to have backing logic that "knew" about the front-end XPage explicitly.

In general, it's better design to stick to value bindings like value="#{someBean.firstName}" and not make your backing objects aware of the front-end UI, unless you have an explicit reason to do otherwise.