The Java EE 5 Tutorial

Registering a Value-Change Listener on a Component

A page author can register a ValueChangeListener implementation on a component that implements EditableValueHolder by nesting a valueChangeListener tag within the component’s tag on the page. The valueChangeListener tag supports two attributes:

A page author must use one of these attributes to reference the value-change listener. The type attribute accepts a literal or a value expression. The binding attribute only accepts a value expression, which must point to a backing bean property that accepts and returns a ValueChangeListener implementation.

Following is the tag corresponding to the name component from the bookcashier.jsp page. It uses the type attribute to reference a value-change listener:

<h:inputText  id="name" size="50" value="#{cashier.name}"
     required="true">    
     <f:valueChangeListener type="listeners.NameChanged" />
</h:inputText>

The type attribute specifies the custom NameChanged listener as the ValueChangeListener implementation to register on the name component.

After this component tag is processed and local values have been validated, its corresponding component instance will queue the ValueChangeEvent associated with the specified ValueChangeListener to the component.

The binding attribute is used to bind a ValueChangeListener implementation to a backing bean property. It works in a similar way to the binding attribute supported by the standard converter tags. Binding Component Values and Instances to External Data Sources explains more about binding listeners to backing bean properties.