widgetVar name collision in Primefaces in multiple cc:renderFacet - jsf-2

I have composite component, in which I have toolbar and datatable. I also defined facet which contains a form for manipulating data from datatable. Users define that facet for different kinds of data. Now, I have problem because I render that facet multiple times and now I have collisions for widgetVar names for Primefaces components. It is no possible to use insertChildren multiple times so I think this is only possible solution. Also I wouldn't like to force users of component to define 10 facets and write ui:include 10 times. Is there any other way to insert some facelet code in composite component, or is there any way to pass parameter to facet, and use that parameter to dynamically create widgetVar?

OK, after some time I just didn't succeeded to do what I wanted. First I had some composite component like this:
<cc:interface>
<!-- Attributes definition -->
<cc:facet name="form"/>
</cc:interface>
<cc:implementation>
<p:dialog><f:subview id="detailSubview1"><cc:renderFacet name="form"/></f:subview></p:dialog>
<p:dialog><f:subview id="detailSubview2"><cc:renderFacet name="form"/></f:subview></p:dialog>
<!-- There is some more renderFacets but this is enough -->
</cc:implementation>
If I have for example p:selectOneMenu inside the form, without any widgetVar definitions, all will be with same name for widgetVar and this is a problem.
So, I changed this completely and I will transform this composite component to ui:composition and decorate it in my page. In that case widget vars are generated as I want, with different names, because they are in different naming containers.

A widgetVar is in fact used in JavaScript to identify the component. Therefor a widgetVar must be unique in a page. You'll have to declare it yourself.
If you want to create a custom component, as I think might suit you better than ui:define/ui:include, you might want to do something like this:
Say we want to create a component that renders a p:commandButton and a h:outputText with the same value (for whatever reason). You create a XHTML page in directory [deployed-root]/resources/example, named customComponent.xhtm:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"
xmlns:p="http://primefaces.org/ui"
xmlns:c="http://java.sun.com/jsf/composite">
<c:interface>
<c:attribute name="text" required="true" />
</c:interface>
<c:implementation>
<h:outputText value="#{cc.attrs.text}" />
<p:commandButton value="#{cc.attrs.text}" />
</c:implementation>
</html>
Then to use this in another page you'll have to define the namespace xmlns:e="http://java.sun.com/jsf/composite/example", and then you can refer to the custom component like this: <e:customComponent text="some text here"/>.
It should also be noted that it is bad practice to declare forms in custom components. This affects flexibility of use drastically since forms cannot be nested.

PrimeFaces can generate wigetVars so you don't have to.
From the 3.4 User's Guide:
<p:dialog id="dlg">
<!-- contents -->
</p:dialog>
<p:commandButton type="button" value="Show" onclick="#{p:widgetVar('dlg')}.show();"/>
This is designed to work in naming containers, so it should work just fine in composite components, <ui:repeat/>, <h:dataTable/>, etc.

Related

wrong ids when render h:panelGroup's inside c:forEach

I have page where I render some h:panelGroup panels. Those panels are realized as plugins registered in a plugin registry on startup.
Part of the plugins api is a custom jsf component where I get the registered plugins for extension point and include their facelet templates by path:
<c:forEach items="#{pluginRegistry.getPlugins(point)}" var="extension">
<ui:include src="#{extension.path}" />
</c:forEach>
The page where I include the panels looks like:
<h:panelGrid id="dashboard" columns="3">
<cmf:insertPageFragments point="dashboardExtensionPoint" />
</h:panelGrid>
For every panel there are facelet templates like the one below:
<rich:panel id="caseDetailsPanel" header="panel label">
<!-- panel content -->
</rich:panel>
Now, the problem is that the very first panel in the list returned by the pluginsRegistry is rendered in the page with the provided id like formId:caseDetailsPanel for example. The rest of them have generated ids like formId:j_idt223 !!! Obviously if I want to rerender some of the panels, I can't do that.
That happens when environment is jboss AS 7.1 with JSF 2.1, richfaces 4.2.3.Final.
When deployed on jboss-eap-6.1 everything looks fine but for now I can't use this jboss version.
Any suggestions on how to workaround this issue?
There can not be multiple JSF components with the same ID. Each JSF component must have an unique ID. When dynamically creating JSF components using JSTL, you need to manually assign and ensure an unique ID, otherwise JSF will discard the provided ID and autogenerate an unique ID.
There are several ways to achieve this, depending on the concrete functional requirement and the existing code.
Use use the iteration index of <c:forEach>.
<c:forEach ... varStatus="loop">
...
<rich:panel id="caseDetailsPanel_#{loop.index}" ...>
This will generate caseDetailsPanel_0, caseDetailsPanel_1, etc depending on the current iteration index.
Use the unique identifier of the currently iterated item. It isn't clear based on the information provided so far if you have any, so here's just a fictive example assuming that the class behind #{extension} has an id property representing the technical DB identifier.
<c:forEach ... var="extension">
...
<rich:panel id="caseDetailsPanel_#{extension.id}" ...>
Wrap #1 or #2 if necessary in a <f:subview> with an unique identifier, so that you don't need to modify the includes.
<c:forEach ... varStatus="loop">
<f:subview id="panel_#{loop.index}">
<ui:include ... />
The <f:subview> creates a new NamingContainer around it, so you end up getting formId:panel_0:caseDetailsPanel, formId:panel_1:caseDetailsPanel and so on.
A completely different alternative would be to use <ui:repeat> instead of <c:forEach>. The <ui:repeat> does not run during view build time, but during view render time. This way there's physically only one <rich:panel id="caseDetailsPanel"> component in the component tree which is reused multiple times during generating HTML whereby JSF will take care of generating the right IDs with the <ui:repeat> index like so formId:repeatId:0:caseDetailsPanel. However, this in turn may cause trouble with <ui:include> as it also runs during view build time and thus can't get the #{extension} at hands.

Unique ID for JSF composite component inside dataTable

I am using PrimeFaces 3.2 with JSF 2 in a glassfish 3.1.2.
I have a <p:dataTable> which displays search results containing information on different issues (the issues are assigned to users).
If somebody clicks on the icon of the assigned user a <p:dialog> pops up.
The user icon and the according dialog are implemented using a composite.
Inside the composite I am using some jQuery functions which need a unique ID for each dialog component - I am not able to find a way to solve this problem.
My investigations so far:
I need to set the widgetVar attribute, which works fine as long as I have only one user in the list but it seems that inside a dataTable the widgetVar is not unique for many composites.
Since the user can be displayed more than one time inside the search result, I am not able to setup an widgetVar like this:
<ui:param name="myWidgetVar" value="widget_#{user.id}" />
and use it this way
<p:dialog widgetVar="#{myWidgetVar}">
also using #{cc.id} does not resolve the problem 'cause it only returns the id of the widget without the naming-container part which is always the same.
I need the complete id as displayed in html (e.g.: form:jdt123:dialog:456) - how can I get this?
Does anyone know what to do?
Thanks Pete
My solution is using #{cc.clientId} which I did not know yet.
This gives me the complete html element id constisting of the series of identifiers glued with the UINamingContainer#getSeparatorChar (e.g.: form:jdt123:dialog:jdt456)
Thanks for the answer. You solved my unrelated problem, but I think I stumbled on another solution for your problem.
From the PrimeFaces user guide (http://primefaces.org/documentation.html):
8.2 EL Functions
PrimeFaces provides built-in EL extensions that are helpers to common use cases.
Common Functions
Component
<h:form id="form1">
<h:inputText id="name" />
</h:form>
//#{p:component(‘name’)} returns ‘form1:name’
WidgetVar
<p:dialog id="dlg">
//contents
</p:dialog>
<p:commandButton type="button" value="Show" onclick="#{p:widgetVar(‘dlg’)}.show()" />
It looks like you would be most interested in the WidgetVar implementation.

Can I add html to a jsf h:message with a custom component?

I would like to add a header and footer image to a h:message in JSF 2.0 so it has nice borders.
It looks like the way to do this is to implement a custom renderer for a component and write out the tags. Id like to do this as a composite component but I cant figure out how to say 'dont draw the header and footer unless youre drawing the message'.
Is there a way to do this with a composite component?
Im using mojarra.
You can use FacesContext#messageList(String clientId) to get a List<FacesMessage> with all messages for a specific client ID (of which you'd usually be interested in only the first one, you can change the below example if you want). So you could just check in the rendered attribtue if the list is not empty. Then you can use <h:outputText escape="false"> to display the message without implicitly escaping HTML. You could if necessary wrap it all in a composite to keep your code DRY.
<h:inputText id="input1" binding="#{input1}" value="#{bean.input1}" />
<ui:param name="input1Messages" value="#{facesContext.messageList(input1.clientId)}" />
<h:panelGroup rendered="#{not empty input1Messages}">
<h3>Some header</h3>
<p><h:outputText value="#{input1Messages[0].summary}" escape="false" /></p>
<p>Some footer</p>
</h:panelGroup>
Note that this method was not available in JSF 1.x, that's why you'd need to create a custom component for it.

A better way to get the real ID of an component in a naming container

I got the following scenario:
I got several tabs (TabView is a naming container )
and in one of the I got a p:inputText which shows a dialog(which is located in other xhtml file) , now I want the dialog to update the p:inputText , the thing is that the id of the p:inputText is unknow (JSF adds some prefix to it)
<h:form id="hoursReportFrm">
<p:inputText id="comment4Dialog" value="#{hoursReportBean.aComment}"
onfocus="dlg1.show();"/>
I can't use this update="hoursReportFrm:comment4Dialog" in the dialog
ATM i looked at the example of this site JSF: working with component IDs (id vs clientId) (its from 2009)
and added binding to to inputtext , like thisbinding="#{lookup.components.comment4Dialog}" and in the p:commandButton of the dialog I changed to update="#{lookup.clientIds.comment4Dialog}"
and It works just fine, but I'm looking for a better way , without the need to bind every component that I would like to access later...
Thanks ahead,
To be quite honest, I think the binding is probably the easiest route, however when I've been in that situation I've found composite components often offer a better solution than bindings. Depending on the situation (and again, its totally case by case) you can use a composite component to get around this problem. This allows you to reuse parts of a page creatively so that your specific updates don't take a lot of work and you can reuse the code.
An example of this might be:
//comp:myDialog
...
<composite:interface>
<composite:attribute name="update" />
<!-- Other attributes -->
</composite:interface>
<composite:implementation>
...
<!-- Implementation -->
<p:commandButton update="#{cc.attrs.update}"/>
...
</composite:implementation>
And here might be the component in use:
//for the sake of argument 'comp' as your library
<h:form id="someForm">
<p:inputText value="#{bean.changeMe}" id="changeMe"/>
</h:form>
<h:form id="dialog">
<!-- dialog here -->
<comp:myDialog update="someForm:changeMe" />
</h:form>
By separating this view into a piece of reusable code you might be able to get around the burden of specifying the full path because it is now much easier to reuse. However, I think it is a toss up of a binding or the composite component depending on the specific case. For reuse, make a new object (component) and reuse it. If you're dealing with a highly dynamic environment: bind it.
I'm not an expert by any means, but generally speaking the above has gotten me out of a lot of tough situations.
EDIT: on a re-read you should also make sure that the tab-view isn't lazily loaded and take a look at the rendering to make sure the path is correct (inspect the ID). I've had problems (in older versions of Primefaces) where sometimes the id was nested inside a p:outputPanel or in rare cases the subview id. It might be a very simple fix by specifying the full path ':subview:form:component' though that shouldn't be the case.

JSTL, composite, NamingContainer and prependId

I have written a composite component and want to use the reserved EL #{component.clientId} to make a JQuery bind. To use this retrieved clientId in a another place in the page (outside the component), I use JSTL to store it in a view scope variable. The strange thing is that JSTL seems to prevent the natural composite component behavior of appending its id in front of its children (NamingContainer behavior). I know that JSTL is a little tricky, interfering with other components (ui:repeat for instance) because of lifecycle things, but here I don't understand this behavior.
Some concrete code is better than this long speech:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:ui="http://java.sun.com/jsf/facelets"
xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core"
xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"
xmlns:rich="http://richfaces.org/rich"
xmlns:c="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core"
xmlns:composite="http://java.sun.com/jsf/composite">
<composite:interface>
[…]
</composite:interface>
<composite:implementation>
<rich:dataTable id="mySoLovedDataTable" […]>
#{component.clientId}
<!-- Commenting or uncommenting this line make the whole point -->
<c:set var="targetClientId" value="#{component.clientId}" scope="view" />
[…]
</rich:dataTable>
</composite:implementation>
</html>
With the line commented on, #{component.clientId} gives something like j_idt261:mySoLovedDataTable.
With the line commented out, it gives just mySoLovedDataTable.
JSTL runs during view build time. It runs at the point that JSF parses the view template into a fullworthy and renderable JSF component tree. JSF runs during view render time. It runs at the point that JSF encodes the component tree into a bunch of HTML. You can visualize it as follows: JSTL runs from top to bottom first and produces a result with JSF tags only. Then, during JSF render response phase, JSF will run from top to bottom and produce HTML result.
In other words JSTL and JSF doesn't run in sync as you'd expect from the coding. Usually you would like to use Facelets' <ui:param> instead of JSTL <c:set>.
<ui:param name="targetClientId" value="#{component.clientId}" />
Note that this does not really set anything in any scope. It merely creates kind of an "alias" for the given expression. I'm not sure if it works in your particular case the way as you intend, but as far I understand the functional requirement, you'd like to be able to obtain the client ID <rich:dataTable> further in the view, after the component. In that case, better use binding:
<rich:dataTable binding="#{table}" ...>
...
</rich:dataTable>
<script>
var $table = jQuery("[id='#{table.clientId}']");
// ...
</script>

Resources