Using maven to check facelets are valid

paul — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 11:36:00 +0000

Although eclipse validates our xml documents, sometimes invalid xml documents can get committed into our source repository by accident.

Using the maven xml-maven-plugin we can force the build to break when xml documents aren’t welformed.

Currently we are only doing it for facelets files (with a .xhtml extension): The xml snippet below shows the configuration of the plugin for xhtml files.

Add this to the plugins element in the build section.


	org.codehaus.mojo
	xml-maven-plugin
	
		
			
				validate
			
		
	
	
		
			
				src/main/webapp
				
					**/*.xhtml

To Do:

Really we should be validating all xml files. Also we should investigate turning on schema validation, especially for facelets files.

JSF, Iterating with tomahawk radio buttons, t:datalist, a4j:repeat

paul — Fri, 14 May 2010 18:22:48 +0000

The standard JSF radio buttons h:selectOneRadio render a load of old school html (i.e. they use table tags to do layout, (all a bit 1996)).

e.g. JSF h:selectOneRadio tag

Code for #{radioOptions}

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;

import javax.faces.model.SelectItem;

import org.jboss.seam.ScopeType;
import org.jboss.seam.annotations.Name;
import org.jboss.seam.annotations.Scope;

@Name("radioOptions")
@Scope(ScopeType.APPLICATION)
public class RadioOptions
{
	public List items = new ArrayList();

	public RadioOptions()
	{
		items.add(new SelectItem("1", "label 1"));
		items.add(new SelectItem("2", "label 2"));
		items.add(new SelectItem("3", "label 3"));
	}

	public List getItems()
	{
		return items;
	}

	public void setItems(List items)
	{
		this.items = items;
	}
}

Note: I’m using jboss seam in the example above, but you could easily remove the seam annotations and define the bean in using jsf managed beans or faces config etc. Also the examples here are a bit mickey mouse and could be better.

Under JSF 1.2 will be rendered as


	
		
			
			Label 1
		
		
			
			Label 2
		
		
			
			Label 3

Anyway this limitation is well known and as a result we’ve been using the apache tomahawk t:selectOneRadio (using the layout=”spread” attribute) and t:radio tags to provide more flexible layouts which can be styled by css.

Iterating through a list of select items

There are times when I want to render the radio buttons in a flexible fashion (offered by t:radio) using a loop tag such as t:dataList or a4j:repeat e.g.





	
	
		
	

	
	
		
		Heading
		
		Another Heading

Unfortunately this doesn’t work and throws:

java.lang.IllegalStateException: Could not find component 'myRadio' (calling findComponent on component 'myForm:j_id3:0:j_id5')

The Fix:

I almost always forget this which is why im blogging about it,

needs to be replaced with

The tomahawk t:radio component must have the fully qualified component name of the t:selectOneRadio name otherwise it cannot find it.

Since the form is defined as:

:myForm needs to be prefixed to the for attribute of the t:radio giving :myForm:myRadio

I take absolutely no credit for this because its explained here and on the Myfaces wiki this article is merely a note to self.

Btw, the above works with a4j:repeat as well as t:datalist

Currently tomahawk isn’t working in JSF 2.0 which is a shame as we are looking to upgrade very soon. Hopefully a decent radio button will become part of JSF 2 at some point.

The tomahawk component library now works with JSF 2.0

Update: Fully Qualified JSF Name

A bit of searching around on the web took me to Lincoln Baxter’s blog where he mentions rendering components outside of the form and explains that the first “:” tells JSF to start looking from the very top of the JSF View Root. Thanks for that!

JSF Blog » JSF

Using maven to check facelets are valid

JSF, Iterating with tomahawk radio buttons, t:datalist, a4j:repeat

Heading

Another Heading

Update: Fully Qualified JSF Name