JSF General Notes

Some notes from the core jsf servlets book.

• value binding expressions, eg., "#{....}". property getter is invoked when the component is rendered and setter is invoked when when the user response is processed.
• method binding expressions
• JSF connects the view and model
• each ui tag is associated with a tag handler. tag handlers collaborate with each other to build a component tree (not necessarily binary tree)
• encoding is when the renderer of a component generated the output. eg., html output
• decoding is when the html elements are processed by JSF container to do things like update component values, navigation, etc.
• six life cycle steps: restore view, apply request values, process validations, update model values, invoke application, render response
• action methods have 2 roles, first carry out the model updates and second tell the navigational handler where to go next
• action method can return null to indicate that the same page should be redisplayed
• all form controls (ui elements like textbox, etc) generated by JSF have names that conform to formName:componentName. if you do not specify id attributes, jsf framework creates automatically
• DataTable : The body of h:dataTable tags can contain only h:column tags and all the other component tags are ignored.
• DataTable: value attribute can be set to an array, List, ResultSet, javax.servlet.jsp.jstl.sql.Result, javax.faces.model.DataModel
• DataTable: h:dataTable wraps objects in a model that extends the javax.faces.model.DataModel class which provides apis like getWrappedObject() and setWrappedObject() which can be used to add/remove table rows.
• Conversion: this happens in the "apply request values" phase where the string values submitted as part of form is converted to appropriate objects.
• Conversion:

• <meta http-equiv="Refresh" content= "0; URL=index.faces"/>