JSF does NOT error!?

[Rory Evans]

Hi all,

Wondering if somebody can shed some light on the following behaviour:

In my xhtml page, if the value attribute of a component attempts to reference a bean name that has not been declared as a managed bean in faces-config, JSF does not error when rendering the page.

For example, if I have the following component: <h:inputText id="id" value="#{BeanThatDoesntExist.someMethod}" />

JSF happily carries on without telling me that i've done something stupid. This can be very frustrating when trying to track down bugs.

On the other hand, if the bean HAS been declared as a managed bean in faces-config but I attempt to call a method that doesn't exist on that bean, JSF will rightly tell me that i'm being stupid.

So my qusetion is this: why does JSF let you attempt to reference a bean that doesn't exist but not a method?

[Tim Holloway]

Actually, I think that you do get an error message in the server log. But JSF operates in terms of postback operations, so whenever no explicit navigation instructions are given, JSF simply redisplays the page.