The Java EE 5 Tutorial

Using Command Components for Performing Actions and Navigation

The button and hyperlink components are used to perform and action, such as submitting a form, and for navigating to another page.

Command components in JavaServer Faces applications are represented by the UICommand component, which performs an action when it is activated. The UICommand component supports two renderers: Button and Link as UICommand component renderers.

The commandButton tag represents the combination of a UICommand component and a Button renderer and is rendered as a button. The commandLink tag represents the combination of a UICommand component and a Link renderer and is rendered as a hyperlink.

In addition to the tag attributes listed in Adding UI Components to a Page Using the HTML Component Tags, the commandButton and commandLink tags can use these attributes:

See Referencing a Method That Performs Navigation for more information on using the action attribute.

See Referencing a Method That Handles an Action Event for details on using the actionListener attribute.

Rendering a Button with the commandButton Tag

The bookcashier.jsp page of the Duke’s Bookstore application includes a commandButton tag. When a user clicks the button, the data from the current page is processed, and the next page is opened. Here is the commandButton tag from bookcashier.jsp:

<h:commandButton value="#{bundle.Submit}"
     action="#{cashier.submit}"/>

Clicking the button will cause the submit method of CashierBean to be invoked because the action attribute references the submit method of the CashierBean backing bean. The submit method performs some processing and returns a logical outcome. This is passed to the default NavigationHandler, which matches the outcome against a set of navigation rules defined in the application configuration resource file.

The value attribute of the preceding example commandButton tag references the localized message for the button’s label. The bundle part of the expression refers to the ResourceBundle that contains a set of localized messages. The Submit part of the expression is the key that corresponds to the message that is displayed on the button. For more information on referencing localized messages, see Rendering Components for Selecting Multiple Values. See Referencing a Method That Performs Navigation for information on how to use the action attribute.

Rendering a Hyperlink with the commandLink Tag

The commandLink tag represents an HTML hyperlink and is rendered as an HTML <a> element. The commandLink tag is used to submit an action event to the application. See Implementing Action Listeners for more information on action events.

A commandLink tag must include a nested outputText tag, which represents the text the user clicks to generate the event. The following tag is from the chooselocale.jsp page from the Duke’s Bookstore application.

<h:commandLink id="NAmerica" action="bookstore"
     actionListener="#{localeBean.chooseLocaleFromLink}">
     <h:outputText value="#{bundle.English}" />
</h:commandLink>

This tag will render the following HTML:

<a id="_id3:NAmerica" href="#"
     onclick="document.forms[’_id3’][’_id3:NAmerica’].
    value=’_id3:NAmerica’;
     document.forms[’_id3’].submit();
     return false;">English</a>

Note –

The commandLink tag will render JavaScript. If you use this tag, make sure your browser is JavaScript-enabled.