Dynamic javascript generation?

[Sol Mayer-Orn]

Hi,

I'm relatively new to JSF (using JSF 2.0).
I have no problem generating HTML files, but now ran into an unusual situation where I need to dynamically generate a *javascript* file.
Something like:

    // The #{db.value} should of course be injected with some value from a managed bean.
    // That's a simplified example - our real-life javascript is more complex...
    function f(){
         var a=#{db.value};
         alert(a * 10);
    }

I'm aware there are other solutions, but I'm not crazy about them:
- inline my javascript inside the HTML page:
- pass 'var a' as a parameter: f(a)

But i'd rather generate a separate (dynamic) javascript file (because our real-life javascript is complex, so the generated HTML would be less readable if we inline javascript into it... and in reality we don't have a single parameter "var a", but dozens of them, which is ugly to pass).

Is it possible to do via JSF?
Or would it be better to make it a JSP (just for this javascript file)?
Thanks.

[Marcin Majewski]

I believe that the best solution would be to use JSF-AJAX(A4J) combination to accomplish desired effect. If you are interested in creating dynamic js and you can abandon the power of JSF managed bean then JSP is probably your choice. On the other hand you can always reference dynamic components value as the following code (provided you have ie. a form named "myForm" with <h:inputText> named "myInput"

var Value = form["myForm:myInput"].value;

[Tim Holloway]

Personally, I recommend passing parameters. Inlining hard values into the JS code can be a real problem. It's harder to debug, I think, and you have to be REAL careful that the JS isn't cached and you end up running stale JS code.

[Sol Mayer-Orn]

Thanks a lot for the replies