Prentice hall core javaserver faces 2nd edition may 2007 ISBN 0131738860 pdf

core
JAVASERVER FACES
™

SECOND EDITION


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core
JAVASERVER FACES
™

SECOND EDITION

DAVID GEARY
CAY HORSTMANN

Upper Saddle River, NJ • Boston • Indianapolis • San Francisco
New York • Toronto • Montreal • London • Munich • Paris • Madrid
Capetown • Sydney • Tokyo • Singapore • Mexico City


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pending applications. Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, J2ME, Solaris, Java, Javadoc, NetBeans, and all Sun and Java based

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with or arising out of the use of the information or programs contained herein.
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Visit us on the Web: www.prenhallprofessional.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Geary, David M.
Core JavaServer faces / David Geary, Cay Horstmann.—2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-13-173886-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-13-173886-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. JavaServer pages. 2.
Web site development. 3. Web sites—Design. I. Horstmann, Cay S.,
1959- II. Title.
TK5105.8885.J38G433 2007
005.2'768—dc22

2007006830
Copyright © 2007 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
4150 Network Circle, Santa Clara, California 95054 U.S.A.
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. This publication is protected by copyright, and permission must be
obtained from the publisher prior to any prohibited reproduction, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or likewise.
For information regarding permissions, write to: Pearson Education, Inc., Rights and Contracts Department, One Lake Street, Upper
Saddle River, NJ 07458; fax, (201) 236-3290.
ISBN 0-13-173886-0
Text printed in the United States on recycled paper at RR Donnelley in Crawfordsville, Indiana.
First printing, April 2007


Chapter

Contents

Preface
xv
Acknowledgments

1

xix

GETTING STARTED

2

Why JavaServer Faces?

3
Software Installation
4
A Simple Example
6
Ingredients
8
Directory Structure
9
Build Instructions
10
Sample Application Analysis
12
Beans
12
JSF Pages
13
Navigation
16
Servlet Configuration
18
The Welcome File
20
Development Environments for JSF
21
Integrated Development Environments

21
v

vi

Contents

Visual Builder Tools
22
Automation of the Build Process with Ant
JSF Framework Services
28
Behind the Scenes
30
Rendering Pages
30
Decoding Requests
32
The Life Cycle
33

2

MANAGED BEANS

36

Definition of a Bean
37
Bean Properties
39
Value Expressions

41
Message Bundles
42
Messages with Variable Parts
44
Setting the Application Locale
45
A Sample Application
46
Backing Beans
53
Bean Scopes
54
Session Scope
54
Application Scope
56
Request Scope
56
Life Cycle Annotations
57
Configuring Beans
57
Setting Property Values
58
Initializing Lists and Maps
59
Chaining Bean Definitions
61
String Conversions

62
The Syntax of Value Expressions
64
Using Brackets
64
Map and List Expressions
65
Resolving the Initial Term
66
Composite Expressions
68
Method Expressions
69

24


Contents

3

NAVIGATION

70

Static Navigation
71
Dynamic Navigation
73
Advanced Navigation Issues

84
Redirection
85
Wildcards
86
Using from-action
87
The Navigation Algorithm
87

4

STANDARD JSF TAGS

90

An Overview of the JSF Core Tags
92
An Overview of the JSF HTML Tags
94
Common Attributes
97
Forms
103
Form Elements and JavaScript
105
Text Fields and Text Areas
108
Hidden Fields
112

Using Text Fields and Text Areas
112
Displaying Text and Images
116
Buttons and Links
119
Using Command Buttons
121
Using Command Links
125
Selection Tags
130
Checkboxes and Radio Buttons
133
Menus and Listboxes
136
Items
138
Messages
157
Panels
163

5

DATA TABLES

170

The Data Table Tag—h:dataTable

171
A Simple Table
173
h:dataTable Attributes
176

vii


viii

Contents

h:column Attributes
178
Headers, Footers, and Captions
178
JSF Components
182
Editing Table Cells
186
Styles
189
Styles by Column
190
Styles by Row
190
Database Tables
191
JSTL Result Versus Result Sets

197
Table Models
197
Editing Table Models
198
Sorting and Filtering
203
Scrolling Techniques
214
Scrolling with a Scrollbar
215
Scrolling with Pager Widgets
216

6

CONVERSION AND VALIDATION

218

Overview of the Conversion and Validation Process
219
Using Standard Converters
221
Conversion of Numbers and Dates
221
Conversion Errors
225
A Complete Converter Example
230

Using Standard Validators
233
Validating String Lengths and Numeric Ranges
234
Checking for Required Values
235
Displaying Validation Errors
236
Bypassing Validation
237
A Complete Validation Example
238
Programming with Custom Converters and Validators
240
Implementing Custom Converter Classes
240
Implementing Custom Validator Classes
254
Registering Custom Validators
257
Validating with Bean Methods
259


Contents

Supplying Attributes to Converters
260
Validating Relationships Between Multiple
Components

260

7

EVENT HANDLING

266

Life Cycle Events
268
Value Change Events
269
Action Events
275
Event Listener Tags
285
The f:actionListener and f:valueChangeListener Tags
Immediate Components
287
Using Immediate Input Components
288
Using Immediate Command Components
290
Passing Data from the UI to the Server
291
The f:param Tag
292
The f:attribute Tag
292
The f:setPropertyActionListener Tag

293
Phase Events
295
Putting It All Together
303

8

SUBVIEWS AND TILES

314

Common Layouts
315
A Book Viewer and a Library
316
The Book Viewer
318
Monolithic JSF Pages
320
Common Content Inclusion
326
Content Inclusion in JSP-Based Applications
JSF-Specific Considerations
327
Content Inclusion in the Book Viewer
328
Looking at Tiles
331
Installing Tiles

332
Using Tiles with the Book Viewer
333
Parameterizing Tiles
334

326

285

ix


x

Contents

Extending Tiles
335
The Library
339
Nested Tiles
339
Tile Controllers
341

9

CUSTOM COMPONENTS, CONVERTERS,
AND VALIDATORS

354
Classes for Implementing Custom Components
356
Tags and Components
359
The Custom Component Developer’s Toolbox
360
Encoding: Generating Markup
362
Decoding: Processing Request Values
366
Using Converters
369
Implementing Custom Component Tags
372
The TLD File
372
The Tag Handler Class
376
The Spinner Application
379
Defining Tag Handlers in JSF 1.1
383
Revisiting the Spinner
387
Using an External Renderer
387
Calling Converters from External Renderers
393
Supporting Value Change Listeners

394
Supporting Method Expressions
396
The Sample Application
397
Encoding JavaScript to Avoid Server Roundtrips
404
Using Child Components and Facets
408
Processing SelectItem Children
411
Processing Facets
412
Encoding CSS Styles
413
Using Hidden Fields
415
Saving and Restoring State
415
Firing Action Events
418
Using the Tabbed Pane
425


Contents

Implementing Custom Converters and Validators
Custom Converter Tags
432

Custom Validator Tags
441

10

EXTERNAL SERVICES

432

450

Database Access with JDBC
451
Issuing SQL Statements
451
Connection Management
453
Plugging Connection Leaks
453
Using Prepared Statements
455
Configuring a Data Source
457
Configuring a Database Resource in GlassFish
457
Configuring a Database Resource in Tomcat
459
Accessing a Container-Managed Resource
462
A Complete Database Example

464
An Introduction to LDAP
473
LDAP Directories
473
Configuring an LDAP Server
474
Accessing LDAP Directory Information
479
Managing Configuration Information
483
Configuring a Bean
484
Configuring the External Context
486
Configuring a Container-Managed Resource
487
Creating an LDAP Application
491
Container-Managed Authentication and Authorization
505
Using Web Services
516

11

AJAX

528

Ajax Fundamentals
530
JavaScript Libraries
533
The Prototype Library
533
The Fade Anything Technique Library
Form Completion
534

534

xi


xii

Contents

Realtime Validation
537
Propagating Client-Side View State
542
Direct Web Remoting
543
Ajax Components
546
Hybrid Components
546
Keeping JavaScript Out of Renderers

551
Transmitting JSP Tag Attributes to JavaScript Code
552
Ajax4jsf
554
Implementing Form Completion with Ajax4jsf
555
Implementing Realtime Validation with Ajax4jsf
558

12

OPEN SOURCE

570

Web Flow—Shale
572
Dialog Configuration
576
Entering a Dialog
576
Dialog Navigation
577
Dialog Scope
578
Dialog Context Sensitivity
580
Subdialogs
583

Alternate View Technologies—Facelets
585
XHTML Views
585
Replacing Markup with JSF Components:
The jsfc Attribute
587
Using JSF Tags
590
Page Composition with Templates
592
Facelets Custom Tags
594
EJB Integration—Seam
596
An Address Book
596
Configuration
601
Entity Beans
601
Stateful Session Beans
603
JSF DataModel Integration
606
Conversation Scope
608


Contents

13

HOW DO I . . .

610

Web User Interface Design
611
How do I find more components?
611
How do I support file uploads?
614
How do I show an image map?
623
How do I include an applet in my page?
625
How do I produce binary data in a JSF page?
627
How do I show a large data set, one page at a time?
638
How do I generate a pop-up window?
644
How do I selectively show and hide components?
653
How do I customize error pages?
654
Validation
658
How do I write my own client-side validation tag?

658
How do I use the Shale Validator
for client-side validation?
666
How do I validate relationships between
components?
669
Programming
669
How do I use JSF with Eclipse?
669
How do I locate a configuration file?
673
How can a JSF component access resources
from a JAR file?
673
How do I package a set of tags into a JAR file?
677
How do I get the form ID for generating
document.forms[id] in JavaScript?
678
How do I make a JavaScript function appear
only once per page?
679
How do I carry out initialization or cleanup work?
679
How do I store a managed bean longer than
request scope but shorter than session scope?
680
How do I extend the JSF expression language?

681
Debugging and Logging
684
How do I decipher a stack trace?
684
How do I avoid the “stack trace from hell”?
687

xiii


xiv

Contents

How do I “hot deploy” my application?
688
How do I comment out a part of a JSF page?
689
How do I find the logs?
689
How do I find out what parameters my page
received?
691
How do I turn on logging of the JSF container?
692
How do I debug a stuck page?
696
How do I find the library source?
697

Index

699


Chapter

Preface

When we heard about JavaServer Faces (JSF) at the 2002 JavaOne conference,
we were very excited. Both of us had extensive experience with client-side Java
programming, and had lived to tell the tale—David in Graphic Java™, and Cay
in Core Java™, both published by Sun Microsystems Press. When we first tried
web programming with servlets and JavaServer Pages (JSP), we found it to be
rather unintuitive and tedious. JavaServer Faces promised to put a friendly face
in front of a web application, allowing programmers to think about text fields
and menus instead of fretting over page flips and request parameters. Each of
us proposed a book project to the publisher, who promptly suggested that we
should jointly write the Sun Microsystems Press book on this technology.
It took the JSF Expert Group (of which David was a member) until 2004 to release
the JSF 1.0 specification and reference implementation. A bug fix 1.1 release
emerged shortly afterwards, and an incremental 1.2 release added a number of
cleanups and convenience features in 2006.
JSF is now the preeminent server-side Java web framework, and it has fulfilled
most of its promises. You really can design web user interfaces by putting components on a form and linking them to Java objects, without having to mix
code and markup. A strong point of JSF is its extensible component model, and
a large number of third-party components have become available. The flexible
design of the framework has allowed it to grow well and accommodate new
technologies such as Ajax. The framework was designed for tool support, and

xv


xvi

Preface

usable drag-and-drop GUI builders have finally emerged. And finally, unlike
competing technologies that let you tumble down a deep cliff once you step
beyond the glitz, JSF supports the hard stuff—separation of presentation and
business logic, navigation, connections with external services, and configuration management.
We are still excited about JSF, and we hope you will share this excitement when
you learn how this technology makes you a more effective web application
developer.

About This Book
This book is suitable for web developers whose main focus is user interface
design, as well as for programmers who implement reusable components for
web applications. This is in stark contrast to the official JSF specification, a
dense and pompously worded document whose principal audience is framework implementors, as well as long-suffering book authors.
The first half of the book, extending through Chapter 6, focuses on the JSF tags.
These tags are similar to HTML form tags. They are the basic building blocks
for JSF user interfaces. No programming is required for use of the tags. We
assume only basic HTML skills for web pages and standard Java programming
for the business logic.
The first part of the book covers these topics:
•

Setting up your programming environment (Chapter 1)

•

Connecting JSF tags to application logic (Chapter 2)

•

Navigating between pages (Chapter 3)

•

Using the standard JSF tags (Chapters 4 and 5)

•

Converting and validating input (Chapter 6)

Starting with Chapter 7, we begin JSF programming in earnest. You will learn
how to perform advanced tasks, and how to extend the JSF framework. Here
are the main topics of the second part:
•

Event handling (Chapter 7)

•

Including common content among multiple pages (Chapter 8)

•

Implementing custom components, converters, and validators

(Chapter 9)

•

Connecting to databases and other external services (Chapter 10)

•

Ajax (Chapter 11)

•

Open source technologies, with a focus on Facelets, Seam, and Shale
(Chapter 12)


Preface

We end the book with a chapter that aims to answer common questions of the
form “How do I . . . ?” (see Chapter 13). We encourage you to have a peek at
that chapter as soon as you become comfortable with the basics of JSF. There
are helpful notes on debugging and logging, and we also give you implementation details and working code for features that are missing from JSF, such as
file uploads, pop-up menus, and a pager component for long tables.
JSF is built on top of servlets and JSP, but from the point of view of the JSF
developer, these technologies merely form the low-level plumbing. While it
can’t hurt to be familiar with other web technologies such as servlets, JSP, or
Struts, we do not assume any such knowledge.

Required Software
All software that you need for this book is freely available. You need the Java

Software Development Kit from Sun Microsystems and an application server
that supports JSF, such as the excellent open source GlassFish project. The software runs identically on Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and Windows. We used Java
5 and GlassFish on both Linux and Mac OS X to develop the code examples in
the book.
If you are looking for a development environment that supports JSF development, we can heartily recommend the freely available NetBeans IDE. Good
JSF support for Eclipse is available from several vendors that sell Eclipse
enhancements.

Web Support
The web page for this book is . It contains
•

The source code for all examples in this book

•

Useful reference material that we felt is more effective in browseable
form than in print

•

A list of known errors in the book and the code

•

A form for submitting corrections and suggestions

xvii

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Chapter

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, we’d like to thank Greg Doench, our editor at Prentice Hall,
who has shepherded us through this project, never losing his nerve in spite of
numerous delays and complications.
We very much appreciate our reviewers for both editions who have done a
splendid job, finding errors and suggesting improvements in various drafts of
the manuscript. They are:
•

Gail Anderson, Anderson Software Group, Inc.

•

Larry Brown, LMBrown.com, Inc.

•

Frank Cohen, PushToTest

•

Brian Goetz, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

•

Rob Gordon, Crooked Furrow Farm

•

Marty Hall, author of Core Java Servlets and JavaServer Pages

•

Charlie Hunt, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

•

Jeff Langr, Langr Software Solutions

•

Bill Lewis, Tufts University

•

Jeff Markham, Markham Software Company

•

Angus McIntyre, IBM Corporation

•

John Muchow, author of Core J2ME

•

Dan Shellman, BearingPoint

xix


xx

Acknowledgments

•

Sergei Smirnov, principal architect of Exadel JSF Studio

•

Roman Smolgovsky, Flytecomm

•

Stephen Stelting, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

•

Christopher Taylor, Nanshu Densetsu

•

Kim Topley, Keyboard Edge Limited

•

Michael Yuan, co-author of JBoss Seam: Simplicity and Power Beyond
Java EE

Finally, thanks to our families and friends who have supported us through this
project and who share our relief that it is finally completed.


core
JAVASERVER FACES
™

SECOND EDITION


GETTING STARTED

Topics in This Chapter
• “Why JavaServer Faces?” on page 3
• “Software Installation” on page 4
• “A Simple Example” on page 6
• “Sample Application Analysis” on page 12
• “Development Environments for JSF” on page 21
• “JSF Framework Services” on page 28
• “Behind the Scenes” on page 30

Chapter

1

Why JavaServer Faces?
Judging from the job advertisements at employment web sites, there are two
popular techniques for developing web applications:
•

The “rapid development” style, in which you use a visual development
environment, such as Microsoft ASP.NET

•

The “hard-core coding” style, in which you write lots of code to support a
high-performance backend, such as Java EE (Java Enterprise Edition)

Development teams face a difficult choice. Java EE is an attractive platform. It
is highly scalable, portable to multiple platforms, and supported by many vendors. On the other hand, ASP.NET makes it easy to create attractive user interfaces without tedious programming. Of course, programmers want both: a
high-performance backend and easy user interface programming. The promise
of JSF (JavaServer Faces) is to bring rapid user interface development to serverside Java.
If you are familiar with client-side Java development, you can think of JSF as
“Swing for server-side applications.” If you have experience with JSP (JavaServer Pages), you will find that JSF provides much of the plumbing that JSP
developers have to implement by hand, such as page navigation and validation. You can think of servlets and JSP as the “assembly language” under
the hood of the high-level JSF framework. If you already know a server-side
3


4

Chapter 1 ■ Getting Started

framework such as Struts, you will find that JSF uses a similar architecture but
provides many additional services.
NOTE: You need not know anything about Swing, JSP, or Struts to use this
book. We assume basic familiarity only with Java and HTML.

JSF has these parts:
•

A set of prefabricated UI (user interface) components

•

An event-driven programming model

•

A component model that enables third-party developers to supply
additional components

Some JSF components are simple, such as input fields and buttons. Others are
quite sophisticated—for example, data tables and trees.
JSF contains all the necessary code for event handling and component organization. Application programmers can be blissfully ignorant of these details and
spend their effort on the application logic.
Perhaps most important, JSF is part of the Java EE standard. JSF is included in
every Java EE application server, and it can be easily added to a standalone
web container such as Tomcat.
For additional details, see “JSF Framework Services” on page 28. Many IDEs
(integrated development environments) support JSF, with features that range

from code completion to visual page designers. See “Development Environments
for JSF” on page 21 for more information. In the following sections, we show you
how to compose a JSF application by hand, so that you understand what your
IDE does under the hood and you can troubleshoot problems effectively.

Software Installation
You need the following software packages to get started:
•

JDK (Java SE Development Kit) 5.0 or higher ( />
•

JSF 1.2

•

The sample code for this book, available at

We assume that you have already installed the JDK and that you are familiar
with the JDK tools. For more information on the JDK, see Horstmann, Cay, and
Cornell, Gary, 2004, 2005. Core Java™ 2, vol. 2—Advanced Features (7th ed.). Santa
Clara, CA: Sun Microsystems Press/Prentice Hall.