Referencing a Method That Performs Navigation

If your page includes a component (such as a button or hyperlink) that causes the application to navigate to another page when the component is activated, the tag corresponding to this component must include an action attribute. This attribute does one of the following

• Specifies a logical outcome String that tells the application which page to access next

• References a backing bean method that performs some processing and returns a logical outcome String

The bookcashier.jsp page of the Duke’s Bookstore application has a commandButton tag that refers to a backing bean method that calculates the shipping date. If the customer has ordered more than $100 (or 100 euros) worth of books, this method also sets the rendered properties of some of the components to true and returns null; otherwise it returns receipt, which causes the bookreceipt.jsp page to display. Here is the commandButton tag from the bookcashier.jsp page:

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

The action attribute uses a method expression to refer to the submit method of CashierBean. This method will process the event fired by the component corresponding to this tag.

Writing a Method to Handle Navigation describes how to implement the submit method of CashierBean.

The application architect must configure a navigation rule that determines which page to access given the current page and the logical outcome, which is either returned from the backing bean method or specified in the tag. See Configuring Navigation Rules for information on how to define navigation rules in the application configuration resource file.