[jsr-314-open] Outcome of JSFDays discussions

[Andy Schwartz]

Hey Martin -

Some comments on the other topics that you raised.  (See the new 
"JavaScript disabled support" thread for comments on that issue.)

Martin Marinschek wrote On 4/2/2009 3:24 AM ET:
> Hi Ed, hi everyone,
>
> as asked for by Ed, here is the outcome of several JSFdays discussions 
> we had on the current state of the PFD:
>
> - Kito did some demos which showed that we would really need something 
> like ui:define/ui:insert for composite components. Currently, the only 
> way to include children is saying <composite:renderUsingPageChildren/> 
> - but we don`t want the children to be there only for the rendering, 
> but for all lifecycle-phases. Same for facets - if we have the 
> possibility to include facets at defined locations in the composite 
> component (not only rendering them), we add a lot of flexibility for 
> composite component authors; flexibility they had before with the 
> ui:define/ui:insert combination, but even more integrated into the 
> plain JSF component idea by using facets instead of ui:defines.

This makes sense to me... ADF Faces has a page template/declarative 
component mechanism that is very similar to JSF 2.0 composite 
components.  We perform facet relocation in these components (not just 
for rendering).  If we are interested in pursuing this I might be able 
to provide more details on the implementation strategy that we use.

BTW, when looking through the PFD spec (the pdf doc) for info on 
<composite:renderUsingPageChildren>, I didn't find anything (just the 
vdl/pdl doc) - though I did find a reference to 
<composite:insertChildren> in section 10.3.3.3.  So at one point was 
<composite:renderUsingPageChildren> named <composite:insertChildren>?  
"insertChildren" seems like a nicer name - and is consistent with our 
<composite:insertFacet> tag name.   Anyone remember how we ended up with 
"renderUsingPageChildren"?   Is "insertChildren" not an appropriate name?


> - A very small thing, but could be very useful: we could define that 
> the component-tag-handler of the facelets-vdl needs to put the 
> location of the component into the component-attributes map. With 
> this, we can emit the location of the component if there is an 
> exception during any lifecyle-phase - I believe this would help many 
> application developers. We can do this now (and shouldn't have done 
> before) cause with partial-state it is not a problem to have this 
> information in the component attributes map.
>

Definitely a fan of anything that we can do to improve ease of 
debugging.  Regarding full vs partial state saving...  I am thinking 
that we may need to save full state in certain cases (eg. if we run into 
cases that partial state saving cannot handle correctly).  If we are 
concerned about bloating the saved state size with location information 
in such cases, one option might be to only store location information 
when project stage == development.  Actually, perhaps only storing 
location information during the development (or, at least, 
non-production) stage might not be a bad idea anyway?

Andy