JSF concurrency issue - jsf

When i hit a link a window popup is opened.I am having a session managed bean that loads a java.util.List.It is taking few seconds to load that list.
when i click the link twice i am getting concurrent modification exception. because the page is in session mode and first request is still loading the List, before it ends the second request tries to update the list.
I have two possible solution in hand
1) introducing synchronized block
Question : Introducing synchronized block leads to performance issue in multithread environment?
2) javascript to disable the link once it clicked.
problem : Not a good option because we need to restore the state of javascript once the popup is loaded. There is a possibility that the link is disabled forever if the popup window terminated abnormally.
Is there any other solution for this issue?

I'd choose option 1. synchronise on something in the session or on the session bean it's self. In a single server environment this should be pretty safe but in a cluster which isn't using sticky sessions you will have to look for a better singleton.
The performance shouldn't be effected as you will be synchronising for each user session for that particular session bean and if there is no contention the cost isn't worth thinking about.

One alternate solution is make the POPUP window modal window means the parent window will
be blurred/ overshadowed till Pop up is closed.
search for JavaScript code.

Choose 2nd option.

if you are using rich faces you can use a4j library of rich faces and rerender the popup link
<a4j:commandButton id="popupLinkId" onlick="window.open("popupLink");return false;" reRender="popupLinkId" />
Here a4j is the ajax for jsf rich faces library. Refer to http://livedemo.exadel.com/richfaces-demo/richfaces/support.jsf;jsessionid=B9DFBAF3AFD62C96B94EEC67FC4645A5?c=support&tab=usage link for further details.

Related

Xpages document changing document mode?

I have a strange thing occurring; as usual, I can't post code, unfortunately, so I'm describing the problem in case anyone can suggest a possible cause.
I have an xpage with a custom control included on it; the custom control handles document locking and changing to edit/read-only modes via links. The document locking is done by setting an applicationScope variable based on the UNID. To make it more friendly for other users on the system, I run a function periodically on the page to check whether the document is locked or not and update a link/label/tooltips appropriately (e.g. if locked by another user, then the "Edit" button is disabled; when the lock is released, it's re-enabled). This is done by calling an "xagent" through a standard, simple dojo-based ajax call.
For some reason, the behavior of the system gets erratic after 45 seconds to a minute. I'm checking the lock status every ten seconds or so, so it's not happening with the first call. I'm displaying a list of records associated with the document; each record is a row in a repeat. When I first go into edit mode, the controls are all displayed as they should be, i.e. editable. If the user changes a particular value with a combobox, it updates the whole row with a partial refresh. When things get erratic, I noticed that the row starts refreshing in read-only mode, which suggests to me that the document is changing edit mode. The only time I knowingly change edit mode is if a "Cancel" or "Save" button is pressed. (The locking mechanism itself doesn't have anything to do with the edit mode.)
It certainly seems like the ajax call I'm making is at the root of this. But I've stripped the xagent and the client-side code down to practically nothing, and it's still happening. I can't see what would be causing this behavior. Can anyone hazard a guess? Thanks....
Maybe check if the server log file has warnings like:
WARNING CLFAD####W: State data not available for /page because no control tree was found in the cache.
If you're seeing those warnings, it could be that the server can no longer find the current XPage page instance in the cache. In that case the page will revert to the initial state, like when the page was first opened. That might be why the document goes to read-only mode.
The session cache of server-side page instances only holds 4 pages when xsp.persistence.mode=basic, or it holds 16 instances when xsp.persistence.mode=file or fileex.
If you load 4 xagent page instances, then that will fill the cache, and it will no longer be able to find the page instance for the current XPage you are viewing. So the XPage will stop performing server-side actions, and partial refresh will always show the initial state of that area of the page.
To avoid that problem, in the xagent page you can set viewState="nostate" on the xp:view tag, so that page instances are not saved for the xagent page, as described here:
https://tobysamples.wordpress.com/2014/12/11/no-state-no-problem/
Or else you can create and reuse one page instance for the xagent, so only one is created. That is, on the first call to the XAgent, have the xagent return the $$viewid value for the xagent page instance (#{javascript:view.getUniqueViewId()}), and then in subsequent requests to the xagent use that $$viewid in the request, to restore the existing xagent page instance instead of creating new instances that will fill the cache. So the subsequent xagent requests will be like so:
/myApp.nsf/xagent1.xsp?$$viewid=!aaaaaaaa!
It's hard to troubleshoot without code, but here are a few thoughts:
How are you checking document locking? Via a client-side JavaScript AJAX call or an XPages partial refresh? If the latter, what is the refresh area? If the former, what is the refresh area you're passing and the return HTML? Does it always occur when you're in edit mode on a row and the check happens, or independently of that? The key thing to check here is what the check for locking is doing - is it checking the server and returning a message outside the repeat, or checking the server and returning HTML that overwrites what's currently on the browser with defaults, e.g. the document mode as read mode.
What network activity is happening between the browser and the server and when? Is something else overwriting the HTML for the row, so resetting the row to read mode.
It's unlikely to be random, the key is going to be identifying the reproduceable steps to identify a common scenario/scenarios and cause.
EDIT
Following on from your additional info, is there a rendered property on the Edit link? If that calculates to false in earlier JSF lifecycle phases, the eventHandler is not available to be triggered during the Invoke Application phase. Because the eventHandler also includes the refreshId, there is no refreshId and refreshMode, so it defaults to a full refresh with no SSJS running. See this blog post for clarification http://www.intec.co.uk/view-isrenderingphase-and-buttons/.

Partial refresh in XPages causing other controls to not execute event handlers?

I have an xpage with a bunch of controls on it. One of them is a simple label that I'm updating with a partial refresh every five seconds. (I'm implementing a document locking scheme, and the label indicates whether someone has locked the document.) A button on the page fails to execute its event handler if I press it while the partial refresh of the label is occurring. At other times, it works fine. Is this a known issue, or is there perhaps something else going on that may explain this behavior?
(I'm unable to post sample code, unfortunately.)
You need to change your approach. Instead of a partial refresh, have an independent Ajax call to an XAgent for your locking (IMHO 5 sec is way to frequent, the WebDAV standard uses 30sec).
The openNTF WebDAV project has locking code you might be able to repurpose for your needs.
The independent Ajax call frees up the jsf lifecycle to run your other events.

best practice for communicating between two beans that back the same page

We are making the transition to bootstrap pages. As part of this, we are making most of our dialogs into simple include files that get rendered on demand. The include files have their own backing bean to minimize code duplication.
The typical use case is when a user enters a page a datatable shows a list of things. The user selects one or more rows in the table and then clicks a button to perform an action. The page is re-rendered using ajax. The datatable is not displayed but the former dialog is. The user then does whatever bulk operation the former dialog does and clicks execute (or cancel). The page is then re-rendered with the datatable showing and the former dialog box not.
The problem here is simple; how do you set the render flags on the datatable and former dialog box? Each of the beans needs to set the render flag of the other bean. I blithely tried injecting each bean into the other and promptly got a circular injection error at runtime. I've gone to having a callback interface that the datatable beans implement. When the former dialog bean gets injected, the datatable bean sets itself up to be called back. This works but I am not sure it's the best way to do it. Being an old swing programmer, I considered using property change listeners, which are much more robust than the simple interface, but I'm not sure what the implications of using them in a managed bean environment are. I did check out the messaging API but it clearly doesn't apply to this case.
So, what's the best way for two view beans that are backing the same page to talk to each other?

How to handle multiple submits before response is rendered?

It has been reported from testing that it is occasionally possible to press a button more than once if the response is not rendered fast enough, causing several invocations of the back-end code, which we do not want.
Application is Java EE 6 Web Profile using JSF 2.0 inside Glassfish 3.1.1.
I was wondering how this should be properly dealt with, and have thought of a few scenarios:
Submitting should disable all buttons using javascript while response is being rendered.
A flag in the Session scope saying it is already active, so the sensitive code is skipped and just moves on to the re-rendering of the response for the previous submit.
A synchronized block delaying the processing until the previous request have finished. Then it should be detected that it has been already processed and skipped.
Using one of the "new" scopes like conversion to handle the detection?
My immediate gut feeling is that the best approach is to have sensitive code blocks atomic, but then the problem is with rendering the correct response.
How should I approach this?
Submitting should disable all buttons using javascript while response is being rendered.
This is the easiest to implement in a generic manner. If you happen to use <f:ajax> exclusively, you could use the jsf.ajax.addOnEvent() to perform the job in a generic manner. An alternative JavaScript approach is to create kind of an "Loading" overlay which blocks the UI so that the enduser won't be able to interact with the underlying page anymore. This is basically an absolutely positioned hidden <div> which spans the entire viewport with some opacity (transparency). You could show it on submit and hide it on render. The keyword for this technique is "modal dialog". UI-oriented JSF component libraries have at least such a component already in their assortiment. E.g. PrimeFaces with a <p:dialog modal="true"> inside a <p:ajaxStatus>, or the <p:blockUI>
The only disadvantage is that it won't work if the client has JS disabled or don't use it and it thus won't prevent HTTP clients from double submits.
A flag in the Session scope saying it is already active, so the sensitive code is skipped and just moves on to the re-rendering of the response for the previous submit.
This is more known as "synchronizer token pattern" and has ever been requested for JSF by spec issue 559 which is currently on the ticket targeted for 2.2, but there doesn't seem to be any activity on it. The detection and blocking part is technically easy to implement, but the synchronous response handling part is not easy to implement if you want that the enduser ultimately retrieves the response as generated by the initial request. The asynchronous response handling is easy: just don't specify any components to update, i.e. empty the collection as returned by PartialViewContext#getRenderIds(). After all, this is more robust than using JS to disable the buttons or block the UI.
As far as I know, Seam 2 was the only who offered a reuseable JSF component for this, the <s:token>. I must however admit that this is an interesting idea for a new OmniFaces component. Maybe I will personally take a look at it.
A synchronized block delaying the processing until the previous request have finished. Then it should be detected that it has been already processed and skipped.
This is not easy to implement generically, this would require a change in all action methods to check if the job is already done. It also won't work if the webapp runs on multiple servers. A synchronizer token is easier as it would be performed before the action methods are invoked. A synchronizer token is also less expensive as you don't end up with multiple requests in the queue which would only cost threads/resources.
Using one of the "new" scopes like conversion to handle the detection?
This problem cannot be solved by playing around with managed bean scopes. Managed bean scopes serve a different purpose: the lifetime of the bean instance.
As Adrian mentioned, I would also use BlockUI. There is a BlockUI component from Primefaces. When you submit your forms through ajax, you could also use an overlay during the request. See Primefaces`s Ajax Status for an example.

IceFaces: inputRichText - session timeout while typing

I'm using the inputRichText component for composing HTML-formatted messages in a system I'm working on.
I've encountered a problem, however. It seems the session times out, even when the user is working in the editor.
I tried setting the session timeout parameter in web.xml to 1 minute and started typing in the editor. After 1 minute the "User session expired" dialog box appeared. Is there any way to make the rich text editor component keep the session alive? It's pretty annoying to work on something for a while only to loose it to a session time out, event though you haven't been inactive.
This is the code I use to display the component in the page:
<ice:inputRichText height="250" toolbar="MyToolbar" customConfigPath="/FCKconfig.js" id="messageBody" value="#{bean.messageBody}" language="sv" saveOnSubmit="true" />
Thanks!
Edit:
I solved it using a periodic JavaScript calling into a servlet implementing the stuff outlined in this IceFaces JIRA report
If there's a better way, please let me know :)
I solved it using a periodic JavaScript calling into a servlet implementing the stuff outlined in this IceFaces JIRA report.
It basically allows a servlet to "touch" the session and hence keep it alive.
If there's a better way, please let me know :)

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