Creating the options

Now that we have the basic framework of our filter we need to add our choices. The filter can be described as a set of options and a set of selections, which are a subset of the options. Collectively we refer to these as the 'choices'. As we are using the ChoiceRenderer to create the drop-down list, so we can use the ChoiceBuilder to create the content that we pass to the ChoiceRenderer. The ChoiceBuilder accepts a HashMap which is the set of id's and values. In our case the values will be the list of genres that we display in the drop down. In this simple example we use the lower case version of the value as the id.

Figure 1. Creating the set of Choices for the genre drop-down

018      HashMap<String, String> genres = new HashMap<String, String>();
019      genres.put("all", "- All -");
020      genres.put("horror", "Horror");
021      genres.put("drama", "Drama");
022      genres.put("romance", "Romance");
023      genres.put("comedy", "Comedy");
024      genres.put("action", "Action");
025      
026      // Create the options and selections using the ChoiceBuilder.
027      ChoiceBuilder choices = 
028        ChoiceBuilder.newInstance(genres, document);