How do I listen for bean's property change event?

In this example we'll listen to bean's property change event. We create a small bean named MyBean, adds attributes and getter/setter. We want to know or to get notified when the bean property name is changed.

First we need the add a PropertyChangeSupport field to the bean, with this object we will fire the property change event. When we need to listen for the change we have to create an implementation of aPropertyChangeListener. In this example we'll just use the MyBean class as the listener.

The PropertyChangeListener has a method called propertyChange and inside this method we'll implementing the code to get the event fired by the PropertyChangeSupport.

package org.kodejava.example.bean;

import java.beans.PropertyChangeSupport;
import java.beans.PropertyChangeListener;
import java.beans.PropertyChangeEvent;
import java.io.Serializable;

public class MyBean implements PropertyChangeListener, Serializable {
    private Long id;
    private String name;

    private PropertyChangeSupport pcs = new PropertyChangeSupport(this);

    public MyBean() {
        pcs.addPropertyChangeListener(this);
    }

    /**
     * This method gets called when a bound property is changed.
     *
     * @param evt A PropertyChangeEvent object describing the event source
     *            and the property that has changed.
     */
    public void propertyChange(PropertyChangeEvent evt) {
        System.out.println("Name      = " + evt.getPropertyName());
        System.out.println("Old Value = " + evt.getOldValue());
        System.out.println("New Value = " + evt.getNewValue());
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        MyBean bean = new MyBean();
        bean.setName("My Initial Value");
        bean.setName("My New Value");
        bean.setName("My Yet Another Value");
    }


    //~ --------------------------------------------- Bean's Getters and Setters

    public Long getId() {
        return id;
    }

    public void setId(Long id) {
        this.id = id;
    }

    public String getName() {
        return name;
    }

    public void setName(String name) {
        String oldValue = this.name;
        this.name = name;

        //
        // Fires a property change event
        //
        pcs.firePropertyChange("name", oldValue, name);
    }
}