rerender of only newly inserted datatable-rows possible?

[thonismeta]

dear community,

we are looking for a way to rerender only newly inserted rows of a datatable. is this possible with richfaces?

let me explain our use case:

we just built a kind of expandable treetable by using a rich:datatable and subtables that only have data when the associated top level row in the datatable is expanded; a click on a "expand row"-link at the beginning of a datatable row fetches the data for the subtable and initiates a rerender of the whole datatable; this worked ok.

as more and more rows are expanded, the table gets longer and longer, and the rerender process needs too much time.
so i tried to accomplish a partial rerender of only the recently expanded subtable;

that means: on first full render of the whole page, all the subtables point to an empty list, so no subtable rows are rendered;
after clicking on the "expand row"-link, which now has a "rerender='subtable'", the subtable finds data to render;
richfaces correctly sends the content of all the new subtable rows to the browser, but the browser does not update anything in the datatable;

i looked into the richfaces ajax console and it was obvious:

Attempt to update part of page for Id: stForm:mainTable:0:subTreeTable
call getElementById for id= stForm:mainTable:0:subTreeTable
New node for ID stForm:mainTable:0:subTreeTable is not present in response

as the subtable has no dom-element representing the subtable, the browser cannot change the content of this dom element.

so my problem is a more general one:

how can i insert some rows into a datatable/subtable and then show these fresh rows without a full rerender of the whole table?

thanks in advance for any help,

thonis.

[vollesommi67]

The same problem occurs in my current project, too. Any hints would be helpful!

[ilya_shaikovsky]

currently can't be accomplished like you whant. In general it is not RF limitation. ajax request should cause an update of some page parts. So if some DOM node not exist - it can't be just inserted because we do not know where to insert the content which comes with response.

So some fake DOM node should present on the client in order to be updated after ajax request.

[thonismeta]

thanks ilya for your answer!

allow me one question:

as all the necessary html to insert the rows for the subTreeTable is perfectly sent to the browser, we'd like to insert these row nodes into the dom-tree by ourself.
is oncomplete the right place to put this special handler?
and how could this special handler access the ajax-response to extract the subtable rows? or can i access it within onbeforedomupdate?

TIA, thonis!