Using `immediate` for a cancel button but saving only some fields - jsf

I have a JSF 1.2 Form which is composed of several parts.
I have validation with required tag turned on.
I want to be able to clear a certain part of the form which has required fields so on the 'clear' button i used the immediate tag.
Now the challenge - When pressing the 'clear' button all the values that were filled since the last submission are restored to the last submitted state while I would like only the certain part of the form to be affected. (Meaning, all the values that are not in that part of the form should be sumbitted although the button pressed is immediate)
Is there a way to do this?
EDIT - Can I submit a value after every time it was filled? This might be a solution.
Thanks!

If you want to take some fields along with the cancel button with immediate="true", then you should also put immediate="true" on those fields.
If you want to skip validation on those fields as well, then you need to change required="true" to required="#{empty param['formId:cancelButtonId']}" so that it is only required when the cancel button is not been used to submit the form.
As to submitting the values on change, that's best to be achieved with ajax in combination with a value change listener. To achieve that you would need to upgrade to JSF 2.0 or to introduce an ajaxified JSF component library.

Related

Null value submitted for a conditionally disabled field in a reusable JSF popup

I have a popup dialog developed in IceFaces 1.8.x (JSF 1.2).
The dialog is reusable (used for account creation as well as modification) and has a cancel button with immediate = true (to avoid validations). This dialog suffered a problem in the past ,where old values were rendered on re-opening the dialog, but that problem is now fixed as directed here (by setting submittedValue to null etc.).
The problem that I am facing now is specific to a conditionally disabled input field (<ice:inputText>) and here is what happens:
The popup is first opened (say for account creation) and this field
is NOT disabled.
User then cancels this dialog and, as we have incorporated the fix mentioned above (setSubmittedValue(null)), the submittedValue for this field is set to null (along with other fields).
Now the user opens "modify account" dialog, where in this field IS disabled. Everything seems to be rendered fine until user makes any changes to the form.
When user changes some field (say name) in the form, a partial submit happens for the name field as expected, but along with it null value is submitted for this disabled field.
This problem can be worked around by adding a null check in the setter method for the field in question, but this is not the desired solution for the project - as there are multiple places where this could be needed and doesn't seem like a very intuitive thing to do.
So I need to understand:
Why is the setter for this disabled field getting called in the
first place? and that too with a null value. The setter is not
called for any other enabled fields.
More importantly, is there any way to fix this (other than adding null check in the setter)?
You must be using rendered attribute to show/hide the dialog
<ice:panelPopup modal="true" rendered="#{bean.enabled}">
When dialog is reopened, it is coming up with some residual values from previous instance
The solution (or workaround) is to use <c:if> instead of rendered attribute, this way the DOM is completely destroyed when dialog closes and created from scratch when dialog opens
<c:if test="#{bean.enabled}">
<ice:panelPopup modal="true">
...
</ice:panelPopup>
</c:if>
This way you even would not need the fix to set submittedValue to null

h:inputText and h:outputText show different values for same (EL) field

I've got a very strange problem here. I have a rich:popupModal which is used to edit an entity. Some of the input fields on that modal use a validator. There is also some ajax going on which is used to update other fields on that modal. There is e.g. a 'Number of packages' field, a weight per package field and a total weight field. If you change the number of packages it will update the total weight field, etc.
Now when e.g. the user entered a value that is too high, the validation fails, an error message is shown. The user can either correct the values on the modal or press cancel.
When he cancels the entity is reset to the values it had before the edit (there were some ajax changes so I need to reset those). The modal closes and a table is showing the correct (reset) values for that entity.
Now the strange thing happens. When I edit another entity the modal is suddenly showing the old values for the previous entity (the ones that did not pass validation).
To debug this I was checking whether the correct instance of the commodity is used so I added h:outputText fields for some of the values and I am also showing the System hash of the entity on the modal.
I've got e.g.
<h:outputText value="#{backingBean.entity.description}"/> which prints 'Stuff 1'
and then
<h:inputText value="#{backingBean.entity.description}"/> which prints 'Stuff 3' (the first entity I've edited). WTH?
I've added getter and a dummy setter on the entity to return the System.identityHashCode. And h:outputText and h:inputText use indeed a different entity but how is that possible when the EL is #{backingBean.entity.hashId} in both cases?
I've used the richfaces a:log to see whether that shows any errors but it all looks okay.
I have tried to clear the modal on cancel (rerender it with no components in) but that didn't fix the problem either. I've tried it on both Chrome and Firefox. Both have the same problem.
What could be going on here?
My environment: JSF 2, Seam 2.3, RichFaces 4.3.3, JBoss EAP 6.1

JSF: Create a "dummy" button which does nothing?

In our JSF web application, we have an input field where the user can enter a numeric ID, which is then looked up by the app. To help the user, the lookup is bound to "onchange", thus it will be triggered as soon as the user tabs out of the field or clicks elsewhere.
So, user enters "123", presses tab (or clicks), lookup runs. This works fine; however, for usability reasons, we also want to provide a button that users can click on, for users who will otherwise wonder "where should I click to trigger a lookup?". To do this, we'd like to provide something that looks and feels like a HTML / JSF button, but does nothing (as the click will trigger the "onchange" event anyway).
Is there a way to make a JSF button that does nothing? I tried using h:commandButton without the "action" attribute, but it still fires a request.
p:commandButton type="button" will just provide a push button.
Since you tagged this question also as a usability issue, I would advise against a button in the first place if the onchange already triggers the lookup.
From a user's perspective it is confusing whether or not clicking the button is mandatory. After they have entered the field and skipped to the next, they see the lookup occur without clicking the button. If there is a button they will assume it's there for a reason.
The option that I favour in these cases is a onkeypress handler with a timeout of half a second, after which the value is looked up.

Using standard validation for read only edit boxes?

Some of my recent posts have to do with the fact that I am doing all of my validation in my Submit button.
The reason I am doing this is that I have a button that sets some read only edit boxes. Well you can configure a validation for a read only edit box but it does not execute at run time.
Since I could not figure this out and wanted to have a consistent look for validation I used my own validation on my Submit button.
Is there a way to validate read only fields?
One nice thing about putting all of the code in the Submit button is that all of the validation code is all in the same place but I can see where it also can cause portability issues when using custom controls.
Also another question is how to fire off validation if my Submit button is not marked as a Submit button.
As Dec says, the ReadOnly flag causes the content of the field to be rendered without the <input> tag. This makes validation impossible on the client side and since there is no data being submitted back to the JVM, validation coded on the field is ignored on the submit.
However, the data source QuerySaveDocument is triggered. Put your validation in there and/or put it in the fields that are rendered (readOnly=false) and be sure to set disableClientSideValidation="true" on all fields with validators on them.
Your QuerySaveDocument code looks something like this (assuming location is the field which is readOnly).
if (personDoc.getItemValueString("Location") == "") {
#ErrorMessage("The inherited location is blank and that is bad.");
return false;
}
return true;
With this, the field based validators will fire first and if they are all successful the QuerySaveDocument fires. This means if any field based validators fail, their messages will appear in your message area but the QuerySaveDocument message will not appear. QuerySaveDocument messages ONLY appear after all field based validators succeed.
When a read only field is rendered to the web browser it does not render using <input> tags but rather a simple <span> tag.
Validation can only be performed on proper input tags so the scenario you are experiencing is correct. There is no field for it to validate in read-only mode.
There is an option to 'display disabled in read only' which will render an <input disabled="true"> type tag for the field but I'm not sure off the top of my head is validation will work for those fields either because if a field is read-only then there really should be no need for any validation because your programmatically putting the value into the field and you should be validating it programmatically before you add the value.

Intercept a4j:commandButton request

I am developing web application using A4J, Richfaces.
One of my requirement is, I need to check if the user has changed any values in the form when he is trying navigate away from the page.
I have save and cancel buttons in the page.
I am using a4j:command button for cancel functionality. Clicking on cancel button should do below things
Check if the user has modified anything in the form (this I am doing by using javascript and have a flag if user changed any values)
Display confirmation box (javascript confirm with values "Do you really want to discard the changes -- YES NO") when user changes form values
If user says YES, then submit the form using AJAX (by using A4J)
My a4j command button code is like this
<a4j:commandButton action="MyClass.cancel_action"
onclick="checkIsPageChanged()"/>
The issue here is, while using using a4j:commandButton, I cannot call the intermediate javascript function (the function which checks if user has updated any values and displays confirmation box) and then submit the request using ajax.
I have looked at the code generated by JSF and the code is like (not the exact but syntact)
<input type="button"
onclick="checkIsPageChanged();AJAX.submit('')/>
The thing is when I click on button, it is calling only checkIsPageChanged() and not calling AJAX.submit().
Any workaround for this will help me.
Thank you in advance.
Use a4j:jsFunction and call that from your a4j:commandButton when the checkIsPageChanged() returns true.
eg.
<a4j:commandButton action="MyClass.cancel_action"
onclick="if(checkIsPageChanged()) { cancel(); }"/>
<a4j:jsFunction name="cancel" action="MyClass.cancel_action"/>
To be more specific we can use:
onclick="if(!isPageChanged()) {return false}"
Returning false will not submit the request.

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