rendered attribute on inputText

Question

I have a search form tied to a backing bean that contains 4 input text fields. The design i am working from indicates that the user should be able to see the search results, but they should not be editable. i decided to use the rendered attribute to show the inputs if the managed bean is empty, and to show an output text tag if it's not:

<t:inputText styleClass="inputText" id="name" rendered="#{not searchCriteria.fieldsEntered}"
value="#{searchCriteria.name}" autocomplete="off"></t:inputText>
<h:outputText value="#{searchCriteria.name}" rendered="#{searchCriteria.fieldsEntered}"></h:outputText>                                     

The display part works correctly, but I am noticing that only the first field is stored in the managed bean when more than 1 search field is entered.

I removed a rendered attribute from an inputText, and sure enough that's causing my problems. I can infer what's going on here, but I don't understand why.

I believe in this situation I will just remove the outputText tags and change rendered to disabled. I am just curious why my initial plan is incorrect.

Answer 1

The rendered="false" will cause the input element not being rendered and thus its value will not be submitted to the server side. If you're using a request scoped bean, the initial value will not be set. You'd like to either put the bean in session scope or to add a h:inputHidden along the h:outputText which transfers the value to the subsequent request.

Since you're already using Tomahawk's t:inputText I'd suggest to rather use its displayValueOnly attribute instead of the rendered attribute and a complementary h:outputText.

In a nut:

<t:inputText displayValueOnly="#{searchCriteria.fieldsEntered}" ... />