Creating Bookmarkable URLs with the h:button and h:link Tags

The ability to create bookmarkable URLs refers to the ability to generate hyperlinks based on a specified navigation outcome and on component parameters.

In HTTP, most browsers by default send GET requests for URL retrieval and POST requests for data processing. The GET requests can have query parameters and can be cached, which is not advised for POST requests, which send data to the external servers. The other JavaServer Faces tags capable of generating hyperlinks use either simple GET requests, as in the case of h:outputlink, or POST requests, as in the case of h:commandLink or h:commandButton tags. GET requests with query parameters provide finer granularity to URL strings. These URLs are created with one or more name=value parameters appended to the simple URL after a ? character and separated by either &; or & strings.

To create a bookmarkable URL, use an h:link or h:button tag. Both of these tags can generate a hyperlink based on the outcome attribute of the component. For example:

<h:link outcome="response" value="Message">
  <f:param name="Result" value="#{sampleBean.result}"/>
</h:link>

The h:link tag will generate a URL link that points to the response.xhtml file on the same server, appended with the single query parameter created by the f:param tag. When processed, the parameter Result is assigned the value of backing bean’s result method #{sampleBean.result}. The following sample HTML is generated from the preceding set of tags, assuming that the value of the parameter is success:

<a href="http://localhost:8080/guessnumber/response.xhtml?Result=success">Response</a>

This is a simple GET request. To create more complex GET requests and utilize the complete functionality of the h:link tag, you can use view parameters.