Help with a design issue that I'm stumped by....

I'm trying to follow the Basic Portal approach but I'm curious how to
accomplish what should be a simple task using the basic portal
framework...


Imagine a EmployeeBean set up in the same way a basic portal bean is set
up. Now the first page I come to is a "search criteria" screen where I
can select how I want to search for a list of employees. So you would
have a from where you can select "department", "firstName", etc. Hit
submit and then you would be returned a list of employees matching the
above criteria selected. 

The problem is I want to use the EmployeeBean to capture the data
submitted from the form. However all of the setters are set up as:
setValue("param",paramValue) which of course tries to set the _current
HashMap inherited from BaseBean. The problem is this HashMap will always
be null under this situation (as it makes sense since there really isn't
a current row to populate for setting up search criteria).

So what is the solution to this? Should I instantiate the _current
HashMap in the EmployeeBean constructor? or is there some other solution
that I'm not getting a grasp of? 

Please help:) Thanks,

-- 
Rick