By Administrator Updated: Tuesday, 29 May 2012 15:26

JSF 2.0 Tag Library

Tuesday, 17 May 2011 17:32

Create a composite tag library

The design of JSF 2.0 is influenced by the philosophy of convention over configuration, popularized by Ruby on Rails. To realize composite components, this philosophy is combined with the resource loading feature, described in Ryan Lubke�s blog JSF 2.0 New Feature Preview Series (Part 2.1): Resources.

The namespace short-name that prefixes a composite component tag, ubiteck :, has an entry in the element, that is, xmlns:ubiteck="http://java.sun.com/jsf/composite/ ubiteck ". The content after http://java.sun.com/jsf/composite/ in this case, ubiteck , is the library-name. The library-name and resource-name are used to create a Resource instance.

JSF 2.0 has a method that creates a UIComponent from a Resource. Due to these conventions, any .xhtml file in a resource library can be accessed as a composite component.

There are several ways to create a resource library. Here is one way to do it.

In your webapp directory, you should have a directory named resources . In this directory is a sub-directory named ubiteck . The name of the subdirectory (in this case, ubiteck ) must correspond to the end part of the composite xmlns for the namespace short-name that prefixes the composite component tag.

Convention	Value
Namespace for composite	A Composite namespace should start with http://java.sun.com/jsf/composite/ <Name�of your library>
Property access	A property defined in the interface section should be accessed using #{cc.attrs. <name of your property> }
Structure content under these resources directories	localePrefix/][libraryName/][libraryVersion/]resourceName[/resourceVersion] items in [] are optional
associate a resource with a particular locale identifiter	If a developer wishes to leverage this feature, they must add a key/value pair like: javax.faces.resource.localePrefix=<localePrefix>

The default implementation will look for resources in two locations and in the following order:

/resources this location represents resources in the webapp itself and if present, must be in the root of the web application
/META-INF/resources this location represents resources on the classpath

HTML Spacer composite component example

Let's imagine we want to create a spacer component. We will create a file called spacer.xhtml in the folder . ./webapp/resources/ubiteck/

The spacer take support a width parameter to define �the length of the spacer. The default value if omiited is 10 pixels.


<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" 
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
    xmlns:composite="http://java.sun.com/jsf/composite"
    xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html">

<head>
    <title>Spacer Ubiteck component</title>
</head>
    <!--
    *****************************
      Usage  :  
        <md:spacer width="50"/>
    *****************************
     -->
    <body>
        <composite:interface>
            <composite:attribute name="width" defaut="10" />
        </composite:interface>
        
        <composite:implementation>
            <h:graphicImage
                value="#{facesContext.externalContext.requestContextPath}/../images/common/spacer.gif"
                width="#{cc.attrs.width}" height="1" />
        </composite:implementation>
    </body>
</html>

The graphic image is tag is more described at Tag Graphic Image �(JSF 2.0)

The component will be reachable defining the namespace for ubiteck and calling <ubiteck:spacer width="100"/> and passing the width parameter


<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
    xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"
    xmlns:ubiteck="http://java.sun.com/jsf/composite/ubiteck">
<h:head>
    <title>Spacer Composite Components Test</title>
</h:head>
<h:body>
    Before spacer <ubiteck:spacer width="100"/> After Spacer        
</h:body>
</html>
<meta charset="utf-8" />

Migrate tag library from 1.x to 2.x

Find below a small table with correponding tags or expressions between JSF 1.x and JSF 2.x

Tags	JSF 1.x	JSF 2.x
A property attribute	myParam	cc.attrs.myParam
Any child components or template text within the composite component tag in the using page will be reparented into the composite component	<ui:insert/>	<composite:insertChildren/>
method param	N/A	<composite:attribute name="<param name>" method-signature="java.lang.String action()"/>
Bean + method
JSTL Choose	<c:choose> <c:when test="<condition>"> .... </c:choose>	...rendered="<condition>"
JSTL If conditional	<c:if test="<condition>">	<f:verbatim rendered="<condition>"> ... </f:verbatim>

Tags: html , http , create , xmlns , composite , resource , component , namespace , library , ubiteck , spacer

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