JSF 2.2: View Action

An example

@Model public class ViewActionBean { @Inject Logger log; private String flag="page1"; public String init(){ log.info("call init"); switch(flag){ case "page1": return "page1"; default: return "page2"; } } public String getFlag() { return flag; } public void setFlag(String flag) { this.flag = flag; } }

<!DOCTYPE html> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:h="http://xmlns.jcp.org/jsf/html" xmlns:f="http://xmlns.jcp.org/jsf/core"> <f:view> <f:metadata> <f:viewParam name="flag" value="#{viewActionBean.flag}"/> <f:viewAction action="#{viewActionBean.init()}"/> </f:metadata> <h:head> <title>View Action</title> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" /> </h:head> <h:body> <p> View Action</p> </h:body> </f:view> </html>

view action is a generic JSF action, it has navigation capability, preRenderView has not.

In preRenderView listener method, you have to use JSF API to navigate to a different view explicitly.

if("page2".equals(flag)){ ConfigurableNavigationHandler handler=(ConfigurableNavigationHandler) FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().getApplication().getNavigationHandler(); handler.performNavigation("page2"); } by default, view action will not be executed on postback phase, but in preRenderView event listener you have to code and overcome it by the following like code in your method.

if(!FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().isPostback()){ } By default view action will be executed in INVOKE_APPLICATION phase, it has a immediate attribute as other actions in JSF, if it is true it can provides a shortcut of the JSF request lifecycle and executes the action method in APPLY_REQUEST_VALUES phase. view action also provides a phase attribute which can specify the JSF phase you are going to execute the action.

Before JSF 2.2

Seam 3 Faces invented view action, of course it provides the view action feature. Prettyfaces also provides similar features, which is called url action.

<url-mapping id="viewAction" outbound="true"> <pattern value="/viewAction" /> <view-id value="/viewAction.xhtml" /> <action>#{viewActionBean.init()}</action> </url-mapping> By default, the action is executed after RESTORE_VIEW and before APPLY_REQUEST_VALUES, which is slightly different from the view action.



The sample codes

JSF 2.2 introduced a new view action feature, which had been existed in JBoss Seam 2 and Seam 3 for a long time.In fact, JSF 2.2 copied the Seam 3 view action exactly.An example is better than thousands of words.Create a facelets view and use a view action to invoke the init method.I created two empty views, page1.xhtml and page2.xhtml for test purpose.Run this project on Glassfish4, go to http://localhost:8080/ee7-sandbox/viewAction.faces . It will switch to "page1", and if you append a flag=page2 parameter, http://localhost:8080/ee7-sandbox/viewAction.faces?flag=page2 , it will redirect to page2 view.We have preRenderView event listener to load resource for view, why we need view action?As you see, there are some difference between view action and preRenderView event listener, view action has some advantage which is not available in preRenderView event listener.Before JSF 2.2, you have some alternatives for the view action.The sample codes is hosted on my github.com account, check out the codes and play it yourself.I assume you have installed Glassfish 4 and the latest Oracle Java 7 and NetBeans IDE 7.4 which has good Java EE 7 development support.NOTE: There is a know issue of JSF reference implementation Mojarra 2.2.0, which can not recognize the newest facelet taglib namespace, http://xmlns.jcp.org/jsf . This issue is fixed in Mojarra 2.2.1, you can get a copy from Maven central repository or Glassfish website