The reason why I am trying this is for field level security. Based on the user and or group we will need to hide/show, disable/enable, for almost all the fields on the page. This was just one idea to stream line the process so we did not fill our backing beans with all this code. The idea was to loop thru the components on the page, call a database (would be cached for session) and set the appropriate attribute for all the necessary fields.
Just an idea and I saw that based on several web pages that this can be done, but apparently it cannot be.