JSF bookmarking problem

Question

I have a h:datatable that display employees data. I want the user when click the employee name to navigate to a new page which URL looks like

employees?id=<some id>

I've tried to combine JSP EL with JSF EL, but no way out.

Answer 1

There are two possible solutions I can think of:

1. Use JSF 2 (part of Java EE 6)
2. If you are stuck in JSF 1.x, use PrettyFaces.

If it's possible to switch to a Java EE 6 server, I highly recommend option number 1.

Edit: There are 2 tags that were added in JSF 2: <h:link /> and <h:button />. These use GET instead of POST. Also, look into <f:viewparam />. On top of this, there are many other wonderful additions in JSF 2. For a brief overview, see this article.

Answer 2

If you're not on JSF 2.0 yet, then you can just make use of h:outputLink in combination with <f:param>, #{param} and faces-config.xml.

Basic table example:

<h:dataTable value="#{bean.employees}" var="employee">
    <h:column>
        <h:outputLink value="employees.jsf">
            <f:param name="id" value="#{employee.id}" />
            <h:outputText value="View employee #{employee.name}" />
        </h:outputLink>
    </h:column>
</h:dataTable>

Basic faces-config.xml example:

<managed-bean>
    <managed-bean-name>employeeManager</managed-bean-name>
    <managed-bean-class>com.example.EmployeeManager</managed-bean-class>
    <managed-bean-scope>request</managed-bean-scope>
    <managed-property>
        <property-name>id</property-name>
        <value>#{param.id}</value>
    </managed-property>
</managed-bean>

Basic com.example.EmployeeManager example:

public class EmployeeManager {
    private Long id;
    private Employee employee;

    @PostConstruct
    public void init() {
        this.employee = employeeDAO.find(this.id);
    }
}

The @PostConstuct annotated methods will be invoked after bean construction and all of injection and managed property setting. Also see this article for more info and examples.