We're using JSF 2.0 on WebSphere v8.5 with several component libraries PrimeFaces 4.0, Tomahawk 2.0, RichFaces, etc.
I am looking for generic mechanism to avoid form re-submission when the page is refreshed, or when the submit button is clicked once again. I have many applications with different scenarios.
For now I have considered disabling the button with a piece of JavaScript in onclick attribute, but this is not satisfying. I'm looking for a pure Java implementation for this purpose, something like the Struts2 <s:token>.
I am looking for generic mechanism to avoid form re-submission when the page is refreshed
For that there are at least 2 solutions which can not be combined:
Perform a redirect after synchronous post. This way the refresh would only re-execute the redirected GET request instead of the initial request. Disadvantage: you can't make use of the request scope anymore to provide any feedback to the enduser. JSF 2.0 has solved this by offering the new flash scope. See also How to show faces message in the redirected page.
Perform the POST asynchronously in the background (using ajax). This way the refresh would only re-execute the initial GET request which opened the form. You only need to make sure that those forms are initially opened by a GET request only, i.e. you should never perform page-to-page navigation by POST (which is at its own already a bad design anyway). See also When should I use h:outputLink instead of h:commandLink?
or when the submit button is clicked once again
For that there are basically also at least 2 solutions, which could if necessary be combined:
Just block the enduser from being able to press the submit button during the submit and/or after successful submit. There are various ways for this, all depending on the concrete functional and design requirements. You can use JavaScript to disable the button during submit. You can use JSF's disabled or rendered attributes to disable or hide the button after submit. See also How to do double-click prevention in JSF 2. You can also use an overlay window during processing ajax requests to block any enduser interaction. PrimeFaces has <p:blockUI> for the purpose.
Validate uniqueness of the newly added entity in the server side. This is way much more robust if you absolutely want to avoid duplication for technical reasons rather than for functional reasons. It's fairly simple: put a UNIQUE constraint on the DB column in question. If this constraint is violated, then the DB (and DB interaction framework like JPA) will throw a constraint violation exception. This is best to be done in combination with a custom JSF validator which validates the input beforehand by performing a SELECT on exactly that column and checking if no record is returned. A JSF validator allows you to display the problem in flavor of a friendly faces message. See also among others Validate email format and uniqueness against DB.
Instead of creating a token manually, you can use BalusC' solution. He proposed a Post-Redirect-GET pattern in his blog
Alternative solutions can be found in these answers:
Simple flow management in Post-Redirect-Get pattern
How can Flash scope help in implementing the PostRedirectGet (PRG) pattern in JSF2.0
<!--Tag to show message given by bean class -->
<p:growl id="messages" />
<h:form>
<h:inputText a:placeholder="Enter Parent Organization Id" id="parent_org_id" value="#{orgMaster.parentOrganization}" requiredMessage="Parent org-id is required" />
<h:commandButton style="margin-bottom:8px;margin-top:5px;" class="btn btn-success btn-block " value="Save" type="submit" action="#{orgMaster.save}" onclick="resetform()" />
</h:form>
public String save() {
FacesContext context = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance();
context.getExternalContext().getFlash().setKeepMessages(true); //This keeps the message even on reloading of page
FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().addMessage(null, new FacesMessage(FacesMessage.SEVERITY_INFO, "Your submission is successful.", " ")); // To show the message on clicking of submit button
return "organizationMaster?faces-redirect=true"; // to reload the page with resetting of all fields of the form.. here my page name is organizationMaster...you can write the name of form whose firlds you want to reset on submission
}
Related
How can I control what customscope is created during request. Right now I have solution that when I click the commandLink:
<h:commandLink action="orders">
<f:actionListener type="com.mk.web.jsf.scope.ResetScopeListener" />
<span data-shortcut="F6" class="start_link">Orders</span>
</h:commandLink>
The custom scope is destroyed and a new one is created. But the problem is that the custom scope only resets if I enter the customers action using this commandLink from above.
When I enter to customers action by directly entering the url in browser the custom scope is not reset. How can I make that is customers action is loading even by commandLink or by url then always this custom scope should be reset. Can somebody give me some advice how to achieve this?
Thanks...
Typically you use a custom scope when you want your beans to live longer than the original request but shorter than the session. Based on your scenario though, it seems to me that your custom scope is behaving slightly like a request scope. Anyway, maybe I'm not understanding your scenario fully but one thing that comes to mind is that you can use system events in case a user decides to go to the next page when they type the address directly. So suppose the user tries to go to nextPage.xhtml, it could be defined like this
<f:event type="preRenderView" listener="#{bean.performPossibleCustomScopeCleanUp}" />
<h:head>
</head>
The (pseudo) method above will fire before the view root (aka nextPage.xhtml) is rendered. Inside the method you can check to see if your custom scope is still "alive" and you will handle it as needed. Keep in mind though that this event will be fired every time the page is requested. For instance, if you click the h:commandLink performPossibleCustomScopeCleanUp will still be invoked. There are ways around that
What can <f:metadata>, <f:viewParam> and <f:viewAction> be used for?
Just scroll down to the section Performing business action on GET parameters of the answer
An even better approach would be to implement a custom NavigationHandler through JSF's ConfigurableNavigationHandler API so you can keep track of the URL and perform actions as needed.
I didn't dig too dig so you might actually find a better code sample. Hope this helps.
Initially immediate flag was only intended for ActionSource interface. But later on it was added to the EditableValueHolder interface also. What was the reason for design decision ?
It's to be used to prioritize validation on several EditableValueHolder components in the same form.
Imagine a form containing input components with immediate="true" as well as input components without this attribute. The immediate inputs will be validated during apply request values phase (which is one phase earlier than usual). The non-immediate inputs will be validated during validations phase (which is the usual phase). If validation fails for at least one of the immediate inputs, then the non-immediate inputs won't be converted/validated at all and thus won't generate any conversion/validation error messages. This is particularly useful in forms with complex validation rules where it doesn't make sense to validate component Y when validation for (immediate) component X has failed anyway.
When used in combination with immediate="true" on a command button in the same form, this will cause all non-immediate inputs being completely skipped. A good real world example is a login form with 2 fields "username" and "password" with required="true" and 2 buttons: "login" and "password forgotten". You could put immediate="true" on the "username" field and the "password forgotten" button to skip the required="true" check on the password field.
In the dark JSF 1.x ages, the immediate="true" was also often (ab)used as a hack in combination with valueChangeListener and FacesContext#renderResponse(), more than often in cascading dropdown lists. Long story short, here's an old blog article on that. To the point, it enables developers to execute a backing bean method on change of a <h:selectOneMenu> without that all other inputs in the same form are been validated. But these days, with the ajax awesomeness, this hack is unnecessary. You can find a concretre example of this case at the bottom of our <h:selectOneMenu> wiki page.
These days, the immediate="true" is still often (ab)used in order to have a specific button which completely bypasses all other inputs, such as a logout button in a "God-form" antipattern (whereby everything is been thrown together in a huge <h:form>), or a cancel button which incorrectly submits the form. Such a button would break when you start to actually need the immediate="true" the right way on one of the inputs. You'd better put such a logout button in its own form, or to change it to process only itself (process="#this" in PrimeFaces). And you'd better change such a cancel button to just refresh the page synchronously by <h:button value="Cancel" />. This works fine if the form is tied to a request/view scoped bean and browser caching is disabled on dynamic pages.
See also:
Should immediate="true" never be used when dealing with an AJAXified JSF 2.0 component?
Trying to understand immediate="true" skipping inputs when it shouldn't
I'm trying to render a button that should be initially rendered disabled and at some point enabled by client side actions. I'm using the component from a4j with the following code:
<a4j:commandButton id="myButton" disabled="true" onclick="myFunction()">
The problem is when the disabled attribute is set to true, the events are not attached to the component, resulting in this html code:
<input type="button" onclick="return false" ... />
So when I try to enable via javascript, the button is enabled, but the buttons don't have the event listeners attached.
So far, the only two solutions I can think about are:
Assigning the value of the disabled attribute to a bean property and rerender the button.
Render initially enabled and disabled on the load page through javascript
Both options would work but they are not very clean, I don't want to make a petition to the server every time I enable the button.
That's just how stateful component based MVC frameworks like JSF works. As part of safeguard against tampered/hacked requests, the framework re-evaluates the disabled (and rendered) attribute of an input element whenever it's about to apply the request values. Otherwise endusers would be able to invoke actions or submit values they're not allowed to do by server side restrictions which would potentially put doors wide open to attacks.
The two solutions which you mentioned are perfectly fine. I'd opt for the first one if you don't want to allow the enduser to tamper/hack it. It can easily be done by ajax.
In earlier projects I often used an s:button or s:link from Seam 2 when caceling something, because it wouldn't submit the form and thus no model updates occured.
Now I switched to WELD + Seam 3 and couldn't find it there anymore - am I just blind or do I have to use something else?
Geziefer
You can do it in plain JSF 2.0 by setting immediate attribute to true in the h:commandButton.
From the MyFaces wiki:
The immediate attribute can be used to achieve the following effects:
Allow a commandLink or commandButton to navigate the user to
another page without processing any data currently in input fields of
the current screen. In particular, this allows navigation to occur
even when there are currently validation errors. A "cancel" button
typically falls into this category.
Allow a commandLink or commandButton to trigger back-end logic
while ignoring validation for some of the fields on the screen. This
is a more general version of the item above.
Make one or more input components "high priority" for validation,
so that if any of these are invalid then validation is not performed
for any "low-priority" input components in the same page. This can
reduce the number of error messages shown.
I found a way to handle it by using the commandButton from RichFaces 4 and setting bypassUpdates to true:
<a4j:commandButton value="Cancel" action="#{myHandler.cancel}"
bypassUpdates="true" render="myTable" />
For me this solution is ok, since I'm allready using RichFaces 4 - but I'm still interested, how to solve this with standard JSF 2.0?
I am trying to popup a window when someone clicks a button on the data table.
<h:commandButton
action="#{cacheController.popupDetails}"
immediate="false"
onclick="popup()"
value="View Details"
styleClass="submit">
</h:commandButton>
The associated popup function is
function popup() {
window.open('RDDetails.jsf','popupWindow', 'dependent=yes, menubar=no, toolbar=no, height=500, width=400');
}
Now in the new 'RDDetails.jsf" file, I am trying to access the same managedBean cacheController. But the problem is, the pop-up window and JSF lifecycle is not in sync. As a result, the popup first displays blank and when I refresh, it pulls out the proper data.
Is there anyway I can click on a button which will do some processing in the managed bean and then opens a pop up which rerieves the processed data from the managed bean.
I am using JSF 1.1.
You're here basically firing two independent requests: one associated with the form submit and other which opens the RDDetails.jsf in a popup. You'll need to combine this in one request. You can achieve this in basically two ways:
Get rid of the onclick and just add target="_blank" to the <h:form> so that it get submitted into a new window/tab.
Block the default action by adding return false; to the onclick and do the business logic in the constructor of the bean associated with RDDetails.jsf. The only (major) caveat is here that the model won't be updated with the form fields. Thus, you'll need to pass the form fields as request parameters of the popup URL manually with help of JavaScript. You can then make use of managed property entries in the faces-config.xml to inject the GET request parameters into the model.
First way is obviously the easiest, but this doesn't give you a "fullworthy" popup/modal dialog. The second way is a bit harder (unless you've already a good grasp on both JavaScript and JSF). I would then consider to look for a component library which provides a ready-to-use popup component.
See my example:
<h:commandLink action="#{controller.myAction}" onmousedown="document.forms['idform'].target='_blank';">
I'm using jsf 1.1