The Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI) API introduced in Java EE 6 complements the JSF framework. There are good reasons to favour it over JavaServer Faces (JSF) managed bean mechanisms.
CDI doesn't do everything and there are edge cases where you might want to make use of Expression Language (EL) bindings during dependency injection. Fortunately, the gaps between these APIs are easy to fill.
A previous
post discussed how to inject the FacesContext into managed
beans using a
broker. This post demonstrates how to build on that approach with
greater levels of abstraction.
It is generally possible to remove direct JSF dependencies from managed bean code. You might want to do this to reduce coupling, improve cohesion or in the interests of writing testable code.
The code was written against Java 6, JSF 2 and JUnit 4 but the approach could be adapted to earlier versions of all of these.
Referencing the FacesContext
directly in Java classes makes managed beans more difficult to unit
test. This post discusses how to mock the context for testing outside
the application container.
These examples use Mockito with JUnit. Familiarity with JSF and unit testing Java is assumed.
I've used the
javax.faces.bean annotations but the
techniques apply for other bean management mechanisms (e.g. using faces-config.xml
or Spring).
One criticism developers have of JavaServer Faces is that it is
not possible to add arbitrary attributes to the resultant markup.
Problems arise when they wish to add custom attributes specific to
JavaScript frameworks (e.g. dojoType for the Dojo toolkit)
or HTML 5 attributes (such as data- or placeholder.)
However, this is not a technical limitation of the JSF framework; only a limitation of the standard control library.
This is a post about how to work with IDs in JavaServer Faces. You may find this useful if you want to use JavaScript with JSF.
Example ID developer sets on a JSF component: foo1 What JSF might render in the resultant HTML: j_id_jsp_115874224_691:table1:0:foo1
This is a revised version of JSF: working with component IDs (id vs clientId), though you don't need to read that. This post fixes some of the issues with the code, provides a more robust version of the library and details how to use it to make simpler, more reliable applications. The target JSF version is 1.2.
This post describes a custom JavaServer Faces component for controlling the flow layout of controls based on localised strings.
Updated 2009/11/24
This post is obsolete; go read this one instead: JSF: working with component identifiers The approach described in this post may fail if the component identifiers are not unique within the view.
Updated 2009/11/24
This post is obsolete; go read this one instead: JSF: working with component identifiers The approach described in this post may fail if the component identifiers are not unique within the view.
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