Testing JSF

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged last (ok, it’s been a year), but I recently came across a question that I have a little insight into, and I thought I’d tackle it briefly.

The question was simple:  ”How do I test my JSF application?”

I’ve used two different test frameworks to do so, and besides being two of the most popular, they also offer a good example of the two different patterns used for Web testing.  The two programs are HTMLUnit and Selenium.  (Please note, there are certainly others –  FacesTester, and JSFUnit (which actually uses/extends HTMLUnit),  to name just two – but I’m going to stick to the two that I’ve used.)

HTMLUnit is a framework which uses browser simulation to test web pages – this means that no browser is launched, which also means that you can do things like test IE7 on Linux without a copy of Windows, as well as running testing in “headless mode”, meaning that you don’t even need a windowing system to be running (which is handy, and also very efficient for performance).  There are downsides to this, of course – for one, it’s possible that the simulation may not be perfect (though I’ve never found a case where it wasn’t).  The other disadvantage is that you can’t actually see what’s going on during testing, which can be awkward when figuring out why your test failed.    HTMLUnit supports emulating FF2, FF3, FF3.6, IE6, IE7, and IE8.

Selenium, on the other hand, uses browser automation – meaning that it’s actually using the browser you’re testing your web app in.  But that, in turn, means you’ll need different browsers installed to test – and in Windows, that means that you’ll also need multiple machines to test all the myriad versions of IE.  And since you’re running a browser in a windowing system, the machine requirements are also a little more substantial.  I’ve also found that configuring the browsers to be a bit tricky at times.  However, any inconvenience in setup is more than made up for by the Selenium IDE, which is really just a Firefox plugin that records mouse and keyboard actions for later playback.  Selenium supports automation of FF2, FF3, IE7, IE8, Safari2, and Safari3.

In both frameworks, you use their Java API to get a copy of a webpage, find components on that page (such as a button), and perform actions on those components (such as a click).  As such, the usage of both is pretty easy, and I’m not going to give a introductory tutorial of either.  (Selenium also offers a couple of other automation scripting methods in addition to Java, though I’ve never used them, so the topic is really much too big for a simple blog post.)

Which should you use?

I suspect that if you’re writing your first JSF test, Selenium is really the way to go, for one simple reason:  JSF id generation.  As I’m sure you know already, every HTML tag can have an id, and that id needs to be unique on that page.  For both APIs, the simplest way to find those tags within your code is to use the id.  There’s just one problem:  the id that’s in the generated HTML may be quite different from the id you use in your JSF page.

Take this (simplified) example:

<h:form id="frm">

  <h:outputText id="out" value="#{whatever}">

</h:form>

Now, say you wish to read the contents of the outputText…  What id would you use?  Answer:  ”frm:out”.  Because templating can be used to insert one page into another, and all id’s need to be unique on the page, JSF has the idea of a “naming container” – every component inside a naming container has its naming container id prepended to the id of the component itself.  A form is one such naming container, but there are many more.

Now, it’s generally possible to figure out what the id will be (though not always easy, given some component libraries), so probably the easiest way to find the component’s id would be to use the Selenium IDE, and use it to find the id’s of the generated code.  The other ways to do this would be to use View Source on your browser, or dump the page contents in the Java code that you’re creating to System.out, and examine it that way.

Other factors may influence your decision, of course.  HTMLUnit has much better support for Ajax, Selenium has (somewhat feeble) support for Webkit based browsers, while HTMLUnit has none.

Anyhow, as I mentioned, I’m hardly an expert in this area, but I thought I knew enough to at least be helpful to the novice.  If you’re not a novice, and you’ve got any additional comments (such as corrections or additional frameworks that folks should check out), please comment…

HTML5 Semantic Tags

Over the weekend, I was reading Mark Pilgrim’s great book on HTML5 – and when I got to the part about the semantic tags, I thought it might be worth a quick mention.

In case you’ve missed out on HTML5 in general (and don’t want to take the time to read that book I linked above), the idea behind semantic tags is that many sites use div blocks to mark out the same kinds of content, over and over. Content like headers, footers, and nav bars. Changing straight <div> tags to tags like <header>, <footer>, and <nav> is granting these tags semantic meaning, hence the name – semantic tags.

Semantic tags are a great idea. They offer a lot advantages over plain vanilla divs, especially for screen readers… but support in IE is pretty broken… The essential problem is this: unlike all other major browsers, IE doesn’t know how to style unknown tags. So the following code won’t work:

 

<style>
    .border {
        border: solid black;
    }
</style>
...
<section class="border">test3</section>

Ah, I hear the more informed folks in the audience say, there exists a library to fix this problem: the HTML5 Shiv. You can use it like so:

 

<!--[if IE]>
<script src="http://html5shiv.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js"></script>
<![endif]-->

This simple script will allow styles to be placed on unknown tags in IE… So, that’s a good start, but there are a few problems with it. For one thing, it relies on JavaScript, so if JavaScript is disabled, your styling will fail catastrophically. Similarly, applying print styles may not work, since JavaScript won’t necessarily be run as part of the print process (note: I haven’t tested this fully, but that’s sure what it looks like in brief testing). There are reports that nesting seems to mess stuff up applying styles correctly, but my testing hasn’t found anything broken in this way that isn’t already broken in IE’s CSS support.

Of course, there is a way around even that: If you are running JSF or some other server side processing on your backend, you could do User Agent detection, and emit <div>’s to IE and the semantic tags to all other browsers. Then, by styling the tags solely with classes and ID’s, it should be possible to make something that gets around the client side issues. Here’s a section from a component that does just that.

 

@FacesComponent(value = "navtag")
public class NavTag extends UIComponentBase {
    
    @Override
    public void encodeBegin(FacesContext context) throws IOException {
        boolean isIE = false;
        UIComponent component = getCurrentComponent(context);
        String style = (String) component.getAttributes().get("style");
        String styleClass = (String) component.getAttributes().get("styleClass");
        ResponseWriter responseWriter = context.getResponseWriter();
        String ua = context.getExternalContext().getRequestHeaderMap().get("User-Agent");
        if (ua != null && ua.contains("MSIE") && !ua.contains("Opera")) {
            isIE = true;
        }
        if (isIE) {
            responseWriter.startElement("div", null);
        } else {
            responseWriter.startElement("nav", null);
        }
        responseWriter.writeAttribute("id", getClientId(context), "id");
        responseWriter.writeAttribute("name", getClientId(context), "clientId");
        if (styleClass != null) {
            responseWriter.writeAttribute("class", styleClass, "styleClass");
        }
        if (style != null) {
            responseWriter.writeAttribute("style", style, "style");
        }
    }

Should JSF add these tags to JSF 2.1? I’d love to hear your comments, below…

Progressive Enhancement with JSF

Progressive Enhancement is a philosophy of web design – start with simple pages, and build them up based on the capabilities of the browser viewing the page. It’s related to (and in some ways, the opposite of) the idea of Graceful Degradation, starting with a nice, fancy page, and dealing with any browser faults in an elegant manner.

Prehaps the simplest example to see this in action is the case of JavaScript being disabled in the browser – this is occasionally true for certain corporate clients concerned about security, and sometimes the case for very old browsers.

JSF handles this usecase pretty well – consider the following code:

   1
   2 <f:ajax render="grace :text">
   3   <h:selectBooleanCheckbox value="#{grace.checked}"/>
   4 </f:ajax>
 

This creates a checkbox input with an onclick event handler registered. If there’s no JavaScript enabled, it will continue to function as thought the ajax tag wasn’t there at all. But the user will need to submit the form with a button press…

There is another way to handle this: we could instead create a link, which uses view parameters:

 

   1 <f:metadata>
   2     <f:viewParam name="checked" value="#{grace.checked}"/>
   3 </f:metadata>
   4 <h:link value="check me">
   5     <f:param name="checked" value="#{!grace.checked}"/>
   6 </h:link>

That works, but isn’t as clean looking as the first, ajax method. Combining these approachs should provide a better user experience – and doing so isn’t especially difficult:

   1 <f:metadata>
   2     <f:viewParam name="checked" value="#{grace.checked}"/>
   3 </f:metadata>
   4 <h:outputText id="text" value="Checked: #{grace.checked}"/>
   5 <h:form id="form">
   6     <h:panelGroup id="grace" layout="block">
   7         <h:panelGroup id="default">
   8             <h:link value="check me">
   9                 <f:param name="checked" value="#{!grace.checked}"/>
  10             </h:link>
  11         </h:panelGroup>
  12         <h:panelGroup id="enhanced" style="display: none">
  13             <f:ajax render="grace :text">
  14                 <h:selectBooleanCheckbox value="#{grace.checked}"/>
  15             </f:ajax>
  16         </h:panelGroup>
  17         <script type="text/javascript">
  18             var def = document.getElementById("form:default");
  19             var enh = document.getElementById("form:enhanced"); 
  20             def.style.display = "none";
  21             enh.style.display = "block";
  22         </script>
  23     </h:panelGroup>
  24 </h:form>

First, create two divs, one with the link and the other with the checkbox, which is hidden by default. If JavaScript is enabled, then hide the link and show the checkbox. This is the basic idea behind Progressive Enhancement – first, create something that you’ll be happy with in any browser, then add features (in this case, an Ajaxified checkbox) as needed.

That’s all for today. One personal note: Today is my last day officially employed by Sun Microsystems – I wasn’t offered a position at Oracle, and I’m currently actively looking for something. Please feel free to checkout my resume, and let me know if you know of any openings that you think might be a fit for me.

(This article originally published on my java.net blog on February 7, 2010.)

Request aggregation in JSF 2 Ajax

I’ve had a few requests for request aggregation, ala RichFaces queues, in JSF 2. This was deliberately not included in JSF 2.0, but it will be considered for JSF 2.1. The reason why is simple – there was simply not very much time, once all the base Ajax work was completed, to add any additional features. However, adding this functionality yourself isn’t actually very hard. Here’s an example of how.

For those not familiar with the idea of request aggregation, the idea is a pretty simple one: in cases where the user may generate a large number of requests (for instance, with the keyup event), you’re going to want to wait and see if you can bundle the requests together, so you don’t spam the server with thousands of tiny little requests.

The example will have two parts: a JSF page, and some backing JavaScript. The end result will be a program which accepts input, and echos it out to another part of the page via an Ajax request to the server. There’s also a status area to show a little of what’s going on during the call.

Here’s the form:

   1 <h:form id="form1" prependId="false">
   2     <h:outputScript name="jsf.js" library="javax.faces" target="head"/>
   3     <h:outputScript name="javascript/aggregate.js" target="head"/>
   4 
   5     Output: <h:outputText id="out1" value="#{echo.str}"/>
   6     <br/>
   7     Input: <h:inputText id="in2" value="#{echo.str}" autocomplete="off"
   8                         onkeyup="aggregate('out1 in1', this)"/>
   9     <br/>
  10     Status:
  11     <br/>
  12     <textarea id="status" rows="10" cols="50" readonly="readonly"/>
  13 </h:form>

And here’s the backing JavaScript:

   1 var increment = 1000; 
   2 var token;
   3 function aggregate(target, element) {
   4     window.clearTimeout(token);
   5     addStatusMessage("cleared request, requeued");
   6     var send = function send() {
   7         jsf.ajax.request(element, null, {render: target});
   8     };
   9     token = window.setTimeout(send, increment);
  10 }
  11 
  12 function addStatusMessage(message) {
  13     var statusElement = document.getElementById("status");
  14     var status = statusElement.value;
  15     var now = new Date();
  16     var timestamp = now.getHours() + ':' + now.getMinutes() + ':' + now.getSeconds();
  17     status = timestamp + ' ' + message + '\n' + status;
  18     statusElement.value = status;
  19 }
  20 
  21 jsf.ajax.addOnEvent(function(data) {
  22     if (data.status === "begin") {
  23         addStatusMessage("request sent");
  24     }
  25 });

This program is simple enough that it’s function should be pretty self evident – but in case you’ve never worked with JavaScript timers, here’s the control flow.

When you type a character into the input field, the aggregate function is called (JSF page line 8). If an outstanding request is already there, it will be canceled (JavaScript line 4), and a status message will be written (JavaScript lines 12-19) to a readonly textarea in the page (JSF page line 12). Then, a new request will be submitted, which will go off after 1 second (JavaScript line 9). If you type a new character before the second has elapsed, then the first request is canceled (JS line 4), before being submitted again with a new value (JS line 9). If a whole second goes by without a new keypress, then the request will finally be sent to the server, which will also trigger calling the event function (JS lines 21 – 24), which in turn writes out a status (JS lines 12-19), to the textarea (JSF line 12).

So, all told, the aggregation code was about 6 lines of JavaScript. And while that may be a trifle annoying, I can only assume that anyone writing a component like Autocomplete will include this into the component so you never need see it.

As always, feel free to ask questions on this post in the comments.

(This article originally published on my java.net blog on October 19, 2009.)

Slides for JSF 2 up on Slideshare

I’ve posted the slides for the talk that Andy Schwartz and I did at Oracle Open World up on Slideshare.

Check ‘em out.

(This article originally published on my java.net blog on October 14, 2009.)

JSF 2, Custom Java Components, and Ajax Behaviors

Unlike most of my blog posts, where I try to describe the easiest possible way to do things, in this posting, I’ll instead go over a Java-based custom JSF component that responds to the Ajax tag. The reason being that there simply aren’t any examples out there of how to do this, and at least two people have expressed interest in finding exactly out how this is done. I’d advise anyone considering doing this to make really sure that you can’t do the same thing in a Composite Component (you usually can), but sometimes, a Java-based custom JSF component is going to be required.

We’re going to cover the following topics here, and it’s going to be a little more code than usual, but I suspect that this will end up saving some folks a bunch of time, so lets plow forward. I’ll cover:

• Ajax listeners
• Facelet components
• Integrating the two

First, the Ajax Listener

An ajax listener, connected to your ajax event with the listener attribute, is a method that will be called every time the ajax request is made. For example, let’s look at the following page section:

   1 Echo test: <h:outputText id="out" value="#{custom.hello}"/>
   2 <br/>
   3 Echo count: <h:outputText id="count" value="#{custom.count}"/>
   4 <br/>
   5 <h:inputText id="in" value="#{custom.hello}" autocomplete="off">
   6     <f:ajax event="keyup" render="out count eventcount" listener="#{custom.update}"/>
   7 </h:inputText>
   8 <br/>
   9 Event count: <h:outputText id="eventcount" value="#{custom.eventCount}"/>

We’ve got three bean properties – hello (which is the string entered by the inputText), count (which is a count of the characters in hello, and eventCount (which is a count of the number of ajax requests). We also have a method on the bean, update (line 6), which will be called every time the ajax call is submitted.

The behavior of this page is pretty simple – every time you press a character in the inputText, the complete value of the input is echoed to the outputText "out" (line 1) – the length of "out" is written to "count" (line 3), and the "eventCount" outputText (line 9) has it’s value incremented by one.

So – what code is in the bean? Here’s the relevant bits:

 

   1 public void setHello(String hello) {
   2     this.hello = hello;
   3 }
   4 public int getCount() {
   5     return count;
   6 }
   7 public int getEventCount() {
   8     return eventCount;
   9 }
  10 public void update(AjaxBehaviorEvent event) {
  11     count = hello.length();
  12     eventCount++;
  13 }

 

Not so bad – the only thing new here is that AjaxBehaviorEvent class – and we’re not even using it. The update method will simply set up the values to be correct, and we let the Ajax render to the rest. So – listeners are easy.

 

Facelets Components

Now, we’ll want to create a custom tag in Java. To do that, we’ll need to make a few configuration file entries, and write a little java code. But first, let’s see it used in the page:

In the XHTML header, we’ll say:

   1 <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
   2       xmlns:ui="http://java.sun.com/jsf/facelets"
   3       xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"
   4       xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core"
   5       xmlns:cu="http://javaserverfaces.dev.java.net/demo/custom-taglib">

Setting up the "cu" prefix (line 5) to point to "custom-taglib" (the whole URL is significant). Then later on in the page, we’ll use it like so:

<cu:custom id="customId">

We then need to add an entry in web.xml:

   1 <context-param>
   2    <param-name>javax.faces.FACELETS_LIBRARIES</param-name>
   3    <param-value>/WEB-INF/custom-taglib.xml</param-value>
   4 </context-param>

This points to our next config file, which is the filename on line 3. Here’s its contents, in full:

   1 <facelet-taglib xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
   2               xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
   3               xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-facelettaglibrary_2_0.xsd"
   4               version="2.0">
   5   <namespace>http://javaserverfaces.dev.java.net/demo/custom-taglib</namespace>
   6   <tag>
   7     <tag-name>custom</tag-name>
   8       <component>
   9         <component-type>mycustom</component-type>
  10       </component>
  11   </tag>
  12 </facelet-taglib>

Note that the namespace element on line 5 matches the URL we used for the namespace in the html element of the using page. We said this taglibrary will have one tag "custom" (line 7), which maps to the FacesComponent "mycustom". Where does it find the definition of "mycustom"? In the Java file defining the component, using the new @FacesComponent attribute. Here’s the full Java code, leaving out the imports:

   1 @FacesComponent(value = "mycustom")
   2 public class MyCustom extends UIComponentBase {
   3 
   4     @Override
   5     public String getFamily() {
   6         return "custom";
   7     }
   8 
   9     @Override
  10     public void encodeEnd(FacesContext context) throws IOException {
  11 
  12         ResponseWriter responseWriter = context.getResponseWriter();
  13         responseWriter.startElement("div", null);
  14         responseWriter.writeAttribute("id",getClientId(context),"id");
  15         responseWriter.writeAttribute("name", getClientId(context),"clientId");
  16         responseWriter.write("Howdy!");
  17         responseWriter.endElement("div");
  18     }
  19 }

In fact, the Java code itself is simple enough that I don’t really think it requires any explanation. Putting the cu:custom tag in your page will now render Howdy!, surrounded by a div with the same id and name as you gave the component. All that’s left is to add the Ajax. That… is a bit more complicated, but now that we’ve handled everything else, it’s really just incremental.

Using f:ajax with your custom tag

To use the f:ajax tag, we’d like to, for instance, do something like this:

   1 <cu:custom id="customId">
   2     <f:ajax render="eventcount" listener="#{custom.updateEventCount}"/>
   3 </cu:custom>

Meaning, we’d like to just decorate the tag, and let it do something "smart". In this case, we’ll default to "onclick" (since we’re dealing with a div, after all, we could also default to "onmouseover", for instance). It’d also be nice if we could still call the ajax listener. That’ll require a bit more code. Here’s the full Java component, with the additional ajax code. I’ll go over it at the end:

   1 @FacesComponent(value = "mycustom")
   2 public class MyCustom extends UIComponentBase implements ClientBehaviorHolder {
   3 
   4     @Override
   5     public String getFamily() {
   6         return "custom";
   7     }
   8 
   9     @Override
  10     public void encodeEnd(FacesContext context) throws IOException {
  11 
  12         ClientBehaviorContext behaviorContext =
  13                 ClientBehaviorContext.createClientBehaviorContext(context, 
  14                 this, "click", getClientId(context), null);
  15 
  16         ResponseWriter responseWriter = context.getResponseWriter();
  17         responseWriter.startElement("div", null);
  18         responseWriter.writeAttribute("id",getClientId(context),"id");
  19         responseWriter.writeAttribute("name", getClientId(context),"clientId");
  20         Map<String,List<ClientBehavior>> behaviors = getClientBehaviors();
  21         if (behaviors.containsKey("click") ) {
  22             String click = behaviors.get("click").get(0).getScript(behaviorContext);
  23             responseWriter.writeAttribute("onclick", click, null);
  24         }
  25         responseWriter.write("Click me!");
  26         responseWriter.endElement("div");
  27     }
  28 
  29     
  30     @Override
  31     public void decode(FacesContext context) {
  32         Map<String, List<ClientBehavior>> behaviors = getClientBehaviors();
  33         if (behaviors.isEmpty()) {
  34             return;
  35         }
  36 
  37         ExternalContext external = context.getExternalContext();
  38         Map<String, String> params = external.getRequestParameterMap();
  39         String behaviorEvent = params.get("javax.faces.behavior.event");
  40 
  41         if (behaviorEvent != null) {
  42             List<ClientBehavior> behaviorsForEvent = behaviors.get(behaviorEvent);
  43 
  44             if (behaviors.size() > 0) {
  45                 String behaviorSource = params.get("javax.faces.source");
  46                String clientId = getClientId(context);
  47                if (behaviorSource != null && behaviorSource.equals(clientId)) {
  48                    for (ClientBehavior behavior: behaviorsForEvent) {
  49                        behavior.decode(context, this);
  50                    }
  51                }
  52             }
  53         }
  54     }
  55 
  56     @Override
  57     public Collection<String> getEventNames() {
  58         return Arrays.asList("click");
  59     }
  60 
  61     @Override
  62     public String getDefaultEventName() {
  63         return "click";
  64     }
  65 }

At 65 lines, this is probably the longest code example I’ve ever posted, but most of this is either really easy, or stuff you’ve seen in the previous section. First, we define what Ajax events we’ll accept ("click") and what one is the default ("click" again), on lines 56-64. These are part of the ClientBehaviorHolder interface (line 2). We also had to add a little code to the encodeEnd method, so that we correctly output the DOM event script as part of the div (lines 12-14, 20-24). And lastly, we needed to add a decode method, since our component is no longer output only – the ajax event handling code is always part of the decode process (lines 31-50). This is the part where we actually make sure that that listener is being called.

Did I mention that you can do pretty much the same thing in a composite component?  That’ll be the subject of a future blog.

Well, I warned you this was a little more complex – hopefully it’s all fairly clear. If it isn’t – ask in the comments.

 

(This article originally published on my java.net blog on October 9, 2009.)

Slides for JSF 2 and Ajax

I’ve placed my slides for my JSF 2 and Ajax talk up on slideshare.

Check ‘em out, and ask questions in the comments.

(This article originally published on my java.net blog on October 5, 2009.)

Mixing Ajax and full requests in JSF 2.0

JSF 2.0 makes ajax pretty easy – but it can’t hide everything from you… It’s tempting to just add a few ajax tags into your page, and not worry too much about interactions – here’s one example of a problem you may run into.

Let’s say you’ve got a page with an input text, and a command button – like this:

   1 <h:form>
   2 <h:inputText value="#{blah.blah}">
   3 </h:inputText>
   4 <h:commandButton/>
   5 </h:form>

Now, we decide to add an ajax tag:

   1 <h:form>
   2 <h:inputText value="#{blah.blah}">
   3 <f:ajax event="blur"/>
   4 </h:inputText>
   5 <h:commandButton/>
   6 </h:form>

Can you spot what’s wrong with this example? When we push the button, we’re also blurring the inputText. That means that the ajax request is sent – but then, almost immediately, that request is canceled as the whole page is reloaded.

Is this a bad thing? For this simple example, not so much. There’s going to be a broken connection – and that can be a grim problem for a large server, especially if you start getting one on each page, for each use.

But the real issue is that you’ve just set up a race condition. Imagine instead you did this:

 

   1 <h:form>
   2 <h:inputText value="#{blah.blah}">
   3 <f:ajax event="blur" listener="#{bean.somethingthatchangesstate}"/>
   4 </h:inputText>
   5 <h:commandButton/>
   6 </h:form>

Now we’ve got a real problem from that race condition – did the listener execute? Maybe. Maybe is never a good answer in software.

So – what to do?

Probably the best solution is also the simplest:

   1 <h:form>
   2 <h:inputText value="#{blah.blah}">
   3 <f:ajax event="blur" listener="#{bean.somethingthatchangesstate}"/>
   4 </h:inputText>
   5 <h:commandButton>
   6 <f:ajax render="@form">
   7 </h:commandButton>
   8 </h:form>

Switching to ajax for the commandButton will now provide a predictable call sequence.

One more issue: When the two connections are submitted simultaneously, an error alert may be produced. I just updated that error to say: "The Http Transport returned a 0 status code. This is usually the result of mixing ajax and full requests. This is usually undesired, for both performance and data integrity reasons." What happens if you want to do this? Well, the error alert only shows up under two conditions, both of which must be true – the Project Stage must be Development, and there must be no error listener set. So, if you’re really sure you want to mix ajax and full requests, despite what I said above, just set up an error listener for your ajax code – you’ll want to anyway for a production environment.

As always, if you have questions, please ask in the comments.

(This article originally published on my java.net blog on October 2, 2009.)

JSF 2.0 Reminder: Project Stage

Just a reminder that while you are developing a JSF 2.0 project, you really, really, really should enable the Development Project Stage. Doing this enables better error messages, including in the client side JavaScript, at the cost of some performance.

Enabling this is as simple as putting the below into your web.xml:

<context-param>
  <param-name>javax.faces.PROJECT_STAGE</param-name>
  <param-value>Development</param-value>
</context-param>

When going into production, simply change the project stage to Production, like so:

<context-param>
  <param-name>javax.faces.PROJECT_STAGE</param-name>
  <param-value>Production</param-value>
</context-param>

This will turn off some error messages, and emphasize performance.

(This article originally published on my java.net blog on September 28, 2009.)

Ajax tag events and listeners

Today we’re going to talk about two features of JSF 2.0′s f:ajax tag: the event attribute and the listener attribute.

The use of both of these is really, really simple – so I’ll just briefly cover the basics, and then launch directly into the sample code.

The “event” attribute of the ajax tag indicates which event to use to trigger the ajax request. There are any number of possible events allowed: You can use the standard browser DOM events (like click, change, keyup, etc. You can also use two special event values – action and valueChange. These two special values correspond to the same events that happen on the server side in JSF. On the client side, action is typically mapped to click, while valueChange is mapped to change or click, depending on the component.

The “listener” attribute of an ajax tag is a method that is called on the server side every time the ajax function happens on the client side. For instance, you could use this attribute to specify a server side function to call every time the user pressed a key – Handy, eh?

Anyhow, without further ado, let’s see how this works in a page. We’re going to detect every time the user lifts a key (the keyup event) – when that happens, we’ll run an ajax command which updates a counter, and refreshes an output field.

Here’s the using page:

   1 <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8' ?> 
   2 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
   3 <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
   4       xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"
   5       xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core">
   6 
   7     <h:head><title>Ajax Tag Event and Listener Demo</title></h:head>
   8     <h:body>
   9         <h:form id="form">
  10             <br/>
  11             Echo test: <h:outputText id="out" value="#{listenBean.hello}"/>
  12             <br/>
  13             String Length: <h:outputText id="count" value="#{listenBean.length}"/>
  14             <br/>
  15             <h:inputText id="in" value="#{listenBean.hello}" autocomplete="off">
  16                 <f:ajax event="keyup" render="out count eventcount" listener="#{listenBean.update}"/>
  17             </h:inputText>
  18             <br/>
  19             Event count: <h:outputText id="eventcount" value="#{listenBean.eventCount}"/>
  20         </h:form>
  21 
  22     </h:body>
  23 </html>

As I said, we tag the inputText (line 15) with an ajax tag (line 16). That ajax tag listens for the keyup event – when such an event occurs, we send an ajax request to the server. That ajax request will run a listener method (listenBean.update), apply the new string value from the inputText (listenBean.hello), and then render out (line 11), count (line 13), and eventcount (line 19).

The bean itself is nothing special: here’s the example below:

   1 import javax.faces.bean.ManagedBean;
   2 import javax.faces.bean.ViewScoped;
   3 import javax.faces.event.AjaxBehaviorEvent;
   4 
   5 @ManagedBean(name="listenBean")
   6 @ViewScoped
   7 public class ListenBean {
   8 
   9     private String hello = "Hello";
  10 
  11     private int length = hello.length();
  12 
  13     private int eventCount = 0;
  14 
  15     public String getHello() {
  16         return hello;
  17     }
  18 
  19     public void setHello(String hello) {
  20         this.hello = hello;
  21     }
  22 
  23     public int getLength() {
  24         return length;
  25     }
  26 
  27     public int getEventCount() {
  28         return eventCount;
  29     }
  30 
  31     public void update(AjaxBehaviorEvent event) {
  32         length = hello.length();
  33         eventCount++;
  34     }
  35 }

So – questions? Ask below.

(This article originally published on my java.net blog on September 26, 2009.)