Accessing controls?

[Mark Dragan]

Hi everyone, I have question regarding how to access control from manged bean.While I was working in Asp.Net, when user clicked on some button I would show him another control, so my question is how I can from managed bean acess to specific control and adjust it's css so it would have attribute hidden or visible, for example if user click on button1 I want to show him button2.
Thanks in advance

[Ilari Moilanen]

You are not saying if you are using JSF 1 or JSF 2. But I think the following is possible in both (at least with 2). Additionally you are not saying if you want the change happen immediately or after page reload. But you are saying that you want the access to be possible from the backing bean so here is one way to do that.

In addition to binding html element values to backing beans (with value="#{backingBean.elementValue}" you can also bind the entire html element to backing bean.

<h:commandButton id="button1" styleClass="formbutton" value="Push" binding="#{backingBean.button1}" />
<h:commandButton id="button2" styleClass="hiddenFormbutton" value="Push" binding="#{backingBean.button2}" />    

and

@ManagedBean
public class BackingBean  {

private javax.faces.component.html.HtmlCommandButton button1;
private javax.faces.component.html.HtmlCommandButton button2;

//getters and setters and other methods not shown

}    

I do not how usable this is but after reading many JSF 2 books I know that this is possible to do You can judge yourself if this is what you want

[Mark Dragan]

Hi Ilari,
thank you very much for your quick reply, I'm using JSF 2.0 and this is exactyly what I needed.
Thanks

[Tim Holloway]

In actuality, it's often more straightforward to simple have the hidden control include the boolean "rendered=" attribute and control its visibility from a backing bean. The master control can then fire an action processer that sets/resets the property references in the "rendered=" attribute.

Because we're talking HTTP here, firing an action will by default re-render the entire webpage, which is usually visually annoying. Fortunately, we live in modern times and can use AJAX to do partial page rendering. That's a standard feature under JSF2 and is possible under JSF1 using one of the AJAX-supportive extension tagsets. For example, RichFaces has a "reRender=" attribute that can be used to restrict the re-rendering to just the dependent control. You'll probably also want 'immediate="true"' on the master control.

Binding requires that you write JSF-specific Java code. Using the above technique works on ordinary POJO backing beans and doesn't lock them into the JSF framework. Plus, I think it's easier to understand.

Binding is useful and even essential in certain cases, but people over-use it. I think that may be partly due to out-of-date JSF documentation that didn't have more civilized techniques to call upon.