JSF custom components

[tomek.f]

Hello.

I have a question about creating custom components in JSF. Does anyone do that? Is it maintainable in long term/ big projeccts? I  need to create customDataTable quite similar to Richfaces extendedDataTable. Your experience?

Regards,

Tomek.

[blabno]

We're using custom components in every project. They are easy to maintain.

[mcmurdosound]

I've extended / "improved" the richfaces ExtDT for our needs by extending the java classes for the UI-Components and the belonging Renderers. It's not a trivial task since the quite complex structure of some of the richfaces components. (AbstractRenderers, Eventhandling, RowRendering, TagHandlers etc.)

Building simple Components from scratch is quite easy - on the other hand. Even adding child components, rerendering, a4j:supports and valueexpressions. But some there're still many things I don't understand and apparently nobody could help me with ;-)

[healeyb]

I wrote a custom autocomplete component and found it pretty tricky. The thing that took a lot more work than expected was

all the javascript required for the results popup and making it disappear. I reckon it took me two weeks to finish it, although I

wasn't full time on it and an autocomplete is pretty simple in comparison to an extendedDataTable, but it was a first attempt

by me at a custom component.

It's a useful skill to have though, if the component library doesn't do what you want there's not much else you can do other

than perhaps have a jQuery front end bolted onto a servlet.

In fact the jQuery/servlet option maybe worth investigating further, there are some good jQuery datatable solutions out

there such as http://datatables.net/.

Regards,

Brendan.