Embedding a link (or other html) in a JSF message

Question

I want to embed a link in a JSF message, is this possible?

When I try it, the rendered html of the h:messages tag escapes the html characters. I tried setting the escape attribute of the h:messages tag to false, but that didn't help.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, this is not possible in the standard JSF implementation. The component and the renderer doesn't officially support this attribute. You can however homegrow a renderer which handles this.

Since this is a pretty common requirement/wish, I thought to take a look what's all possible.

First some backgruond information: JSF by default uses ResponseWriter#writeText() to write the tag body, which escapes HTML by default. We'd like to let it use ResponseWriter#write() instead like as with <h:outputText escape="false" />. We'd like to extend the MessagesRenderer of the standard JSF implementation and override the encodeEnd() method accordingly. But since the MessagesRenderer#encodeEnd() contains pretty a lot of code (~180 lines) which we prefer not to copypaste to just change one or two lines after all, I found it better to replace the ResponseWriter with a custom implementation with help of ResponseWriterWrapper wherein the writeText() is been overriden to handle the escaping.

So, I ended up with this:

package com.example;

import java.io.IOException;

import javax.faces.component.UIComponent;
import javax.faces.context.FacesContext;
import javax.faces.context.ResponseWriter;
import javax.faces.context.ResponseWriterWrapper;
import javax.faces.render.FacesRenderer;

import com.sun.faces.renderkit.html_basic.MessagesRenderer;

@FacesRenderer(componentFamily="javax.faces.Messages", rendererType="javax.faces.Messages")
public class EscapableMessagesRenderer extends MessagesRenderer {

    @Override
    public void encodeEnd(FacesContext context, UIComponent component) throws IOException {
        final ResponseWriter originalResponseWriter = context.getResponseWriter();
        context.setResponseWriter(new ResponseWriterWrapper() {

            @Override
            public ResponseWriter getWrapped() {
                return originalResponseWriter;
            }

            @Override
            public void writeText(Object text, UIComponent component, String property) throws IOException {
                String string = String.valueOf(text);
                String escape = (String) component.getAttributes().get("escape");
                if (escape != null && !Boolean.valueOf(escape)) {
                    super.write(string);
                } else {
                    super.writeText(string, component, property);
                }
            }
        });

        super.encodeEnd(context, component); // Now, render it!
        context.setResponseWriter(originalResponseWriter); // Restore original writer.
    }
}

In spite of the @FacesRenderer annotation, it get overriden by the default MessagesRenderer implementation. I suspect here a bug, so I reported issue 1748. To get it to work anyway, we have to fall back to the faces-config.xml:

<render-kit>
    <renderer>
        <component-family>javax.faces.Messages</component-family>
        <renderer-type>javax.faces.Messages</renderer-type>
        <renderer-class>com.example.EscapableMessagesRenderer</renderer-class>
    </renderer>
</render-kit>

Then, to trigger it, just do:

<h:messages escape="false" />

And it works! :)

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Note: the above affects <h:messages> only. To do the same for <h:message>, just do the same, but replace anywhere "Messages" by "Message" (component family, renderer type and classnames).