natural conversations: take care of cid-name!

[mars1412]

make sure, that you do not have any hidden form field in your page, with the same name as your natural conversation id!

This happened to me today:
For the user registration process, I want to use one single conversation: so I use a natural conversation for this.

pages.xml

     <conversation name="Conv_Registration"
                    parameter-name="registration"
                    parameter-value="register"/>

I chose the cid-name registration and the fixed value register - so the same conversation will be reused everytime the user clicks on the registration link.

this worked for the first 3 pages of the registration form, but the last page always redirected to the first page (on form submission, on ajax calls, ..)
I learned from the docfiles, that no active conversation existed and due to my navigation rules, I have been redirected to the first page:

      conversation-required="true"
      no-conversation-view-id="/reg_page1.xhmtl">

after some time (in fact a lot of time), I think I found the reason:
on the last page, there was a h:form element with id=registration. Because of this, a hidden formfield with name=registration and value=registration has been added to my page.
now when the form was submitted (also via ajax-call), there was a clash between the seam conversation id named registration and the hidden jsf-form field, also named registration.
seems, like the form field won and seam got the conversation name registration and the conversation value registration, which did not match the value of my natural conversation register (specified in pages.xml): thus, the conversation registration did not exist, and due to the navigation rules, I was redirected to the first page.
the first page now reused the existing correct conversation named ConvRegistration:register, but in the seam debug page I also see, that a second conversation named ConvRegistration:registration has been created.

conclusion of all that:
in the future, I will use names, like cid_XXX for all my natural conversations and forbidd those names for other identifiers

     <conversation name="Conv_Registration"
                    parameter-name="cid_registration"
                    parameter-value="register_cid"/>

[pmuir]

You should add this as a FAQ :-)

[mars1412]

hmm. is this really frequently asked?

however, seAms I have no permission to add a FAQ (or new category) :(

[christian.bauer]

That's actually your job, Pete :)