Pageflow, Manual Validation and FacesMessages.addToControl

[amayingenta]

Hi, I'm trying to implement some manual validation for fields that can be null when an entity is saved, but are required when it is submitted for processing.
I'm using pageflow for my form and I'm calling the validation from a decision expression - if it passes it goes to the next page, otherwise I want to stay on the current page.

In my validation code I use FacesMessages.addToControlFromResourceBundle() and pass the component id (e.g. purpose). The Faces Messages are added globally rather than to the individual control.

When I debug FacesMessages.getClientId() the View Root does not have any children and this appears to be why it can't find a matching component. Is this because this is called from a decision node?

Here's some of the pageflow:

<page name="edit" view-id="/purchase/edit.xhtml" redirect="true">
    <transition name="continue" to="validate"/>
</page>

<decision name="validate" expression="#{purchaseHome.isValid()}">
   <transition name="true" to="preview"/>
   <transition name="false" to="edit"/>
</decision>

Is there any way I can change the pageflow so that the validation will be called when the full page is available and it can find the client ids?
Or will I have to use FacesContext.addMessage() using the full clientId (e.g. purchase:purposeField:purpose)?

Thanks, Andrew

[amayingenta]

To add to this, I tried building up the full clientId and using FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().addMessage(clientId, facesMessage), but when I do that I get no messages at all (perhaps it's checking for the matching component and ignoring if it cannot find it).

Perhaps there is no way of adding messages to individual fields as part of a pageflow transition. If so we will have to abandon using pageflow, which would be a shame.

[amayingenta]

An update on this.
I found that adding messages directly to the FacesContext does work, but only if I remove the redirect from the page the error occurred on.
This isn't ideal, but it was enough to keep me using Pageflow.