JSF 2.2 and java.util.Sets

[fastroller]

Is there any planning around readying RichFaces for JSF 2.2? I took a milestone release for Mojarra and upgraded the JSF libs on JBoss 7.1. Sadly Richfaces causes my application to fail. It appears there are some improvements around UIComponent that are not backwards compatible. JSF components now implement pass through attributes which is not handled by Richfaces.

If you're wondering why I want to move to JSF2.2 it is because it now handles Set data models. In the mean time I will use an earlier snapshot of JSF2.2 that doesn't have this backwards compatibility break and continue to use Sets!

If anyone is interested here is my sleuthing:

Exception thrown

Caused by: java.lang.AbstractMethodError

    at com.sun.faces.renderkit.html_basic.HtmlResponseWriter.startElement(HtmlResponseWriter.java:635) [jsf-impl-2.2.0-m05.jar:2.2.0-m05-SNAPSHOT]

    at com.sun.faces.renderkit.html_basic.ScriptRenderer.startElement(ScriptRenderer.java:60) [jsf-impl-2.2.0-m05.jar:2.2.0-m05-SNAPSHOT]

    at com.sun.faces.renderkit.html_basic.ScriptRenderer.encodeEnd(ScriptRenderer.java:106) [jsf-impl-2.2.0-m05.jar:2.2.0-m05-SNAPSHOT]

    at org.richfaces.component.UITransient.encodeEnd(UITransient.java:236) [richfaces-core-impl-4.2.2.Final.jar:4.2.2.Final]

Mojarra implementation

    public void startElement(String name, UIComponent componentForElement)
          throws IOException {

        if (name == null) {
            throw new NullPointerException(MessageUtils.getExceptionMessageString(
                  MessageUtils.NULL_PARAMETERS_ERROR_MESSAGE_ID, "name"));
        }
        closeStartIfNecessary();
        isScriptOrStyle(name);
        scriptOrStyleSrc = false;
        if ("cdata".equalsIgnoreCase(name)) {
            isCdata = true;
            startCDATA();
            return;
        } else if (writingCdata) {
            // starting an element within a cdata section,
            // keep escaping disabled
            isCdata = false;
            writingCdata = true;
        }

        writer.write('<');
        writer.write(name);
        
        if (null != componentForElement) {
            Map passThroughAttrs = componentForElement.getPassThroughAttributes(false);
            if (null != passThroughAttrs && !passThroughAttrs.isEmpty()) {
                considerPassThroughAttributes(passThroughAttrs);
            }
        }
        
        closeStart = true;

    }
 

[healeyb]

Andrew, BalusC has written a render kit which allows attributes not supported by the JSF component to get passed on

to the generated HTML tag, this having been done to allow support for HTML 5 attributes (which would otherwise be

ignored).

I just vaguely wondered if this could have any application in your situation:

http://balusc.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/adding-html5-attributes-to-standard-jsf.html

http://showcase-omnifaces.rhcloud.com/showcase/renderkits/Html5RenderKit.xhtml

Regards,

Brendan.

[fastroller]

Thanks, I've heard about this render kit. However, its not the feature I'm after - I just want to use java Sets on repeat components. Early snapshot versions of 2.2 incorporated this feature, but newer milestone releases break compatibility with Richfaces. I might just patch Mojarra 2.1.X series to use sets and wait for JavaEE7 which will probably incorportate JSF 2.2.

Cheers

[mcmurdosound]

You could convert your sets to lists or arrays. But this would change the collection. Or do some transient stuff where you handle converting from set to list and the other way around in a managed bean. This depends on your needs. (just for output or do you want to modify set from the frontend?)

[fastroller]

Thanks Christian,

I initially created my own CollectionDataModel that would handle Sets, but this required me to explicitly convert my domain model sets to a DataModel in a managed bean. That was too much work so I created an EL function to do it for me. Once again, that was just far too much work when it should be done by the framework. After all, that is the point of a framework : to make the mundane tasks easy. So I just compiled my own version of JSF 2.1 that works with sets and works on JBoss7.1. That is the joy of open source.

[mcmurdosound]

Over the years we've created many helper functions usable from EL. Like concat, substring, listToSet, contains or to get the clientId relative to a root element (if someone uses duplicate IDs which still produce different clientIds)