filtering <rich:column> in composition component - jsf

Question

Hopefully someone can help, because I am quite stuck on this issue. I cannot find much help elsewhere...
The high-level goal: creating a custom tag that will aid in the reuse of an extendedDataTable in Richfaces. I have a custom tag that I would like to be similar to:
<mytag:customTable bean="#{myBean}"/>
The (simplified) file that contains code for the table is as follows (table.xhtml)
<!--...header stuff -->
<ui:component>
<a4j:outputPanel>
<h:form>
<rich:extendedDataTable
value="#{bean.theData}"
var="entity"
id="table">
<rich:column filterMethod="#{...}">
<f:facet name="header">
<h:inputText value="#{bean.filterValue}">
<a4j:support event="onkeyup" reRender="table"/>
</h:inputText>
</f:facet>
<h:outputText value="#{entity.item}"/>
</rich:column>
</rich:extendedDataTable>
</h:form>
</a4j:outputPanel>
</ui:component>
Due to the constraints of the application, using the filterBy="#{...}" attribute inside the <rich:column> tag does not give me what I need.
Accordingly, I have to use the filterMethod attribute. When I hardcode the table with,
<rich:column filterMethod="#{bean.filterFunction}">
then everything works fine. However, I would like to keep the tag more general and NOT hardcode this. Instead, I would like
to also pass the name of the filtering function (e.g. <mytag:customTable bean="#{myBean}" flFcn="#{myBean.filterFunction}"> ). The problem is that
I cannot get any version of this to work properly.
From searching other threads, I see that the way to pass a method to an 'action' attribute has a syntax like: action="#{bean[fcnName]}" where fcnName is just a String (see http://digitaljoel.nerd-herders.com/2009/08/25/passing-action-methods-in-facelets-using-array-notation/).
I have confirmed that this way works correctly when it's an action . However,
this does not seem to help me in this case with filterMethod (perhaps b/c the function signature is different?). Based on those solutions, I would need something like:
<mytag:customTable bean="#{myBean}" flFcn="filterFunction"> with <rich:column filterMethod="#{bean[flFcn]}">
I have not found anything among the many permutations of EL syntax that works. Everytime, this approach throws an exception saying that 'bean' resolved to null.
To check that the bean was actually recognized, I had it print a String via <h:outputText value="#{bean.someString}"/>
(removing the offending filterMethod=...)and there is NO problem. Therefore the problem seems to lay entirely on whatever filterMethod receives. I found what I believe to be a very similar issue here, but that does not seem to be answered.
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I'm facing the same problem using RichFaces 3.3.3 and JSF 1.2 without having a usable solution.
Found a JIRA-entry at RichFaces which is still open and thus probably will not be fixed anymore.