Hello everyone, I ran into an issue regarding the update, which is closely related to a behavior jsf2 exposes regarding component rendering
in the update cycle.

The main issue is following: If we have a component which we trigger with following code:

<myComp:javascriptTestComponent id="myTestComponent"></grv:javascriptTestComponent>
                <a href="#" name="mego3"
                   onclick="jsf.ajax.request(this,event,{execute:'myTestComponent', render:'myTestComponent'}); return false;">submit
                    me</a>

and the component itself renders following in its renderer:

        ResponseWriter writer = context.getResponseWriter();
        writer.startElement(DIV, component);
        writer.writeAttribute(ID,component.getClientId(context), null );
        writer.write("hello world"+Math.random());
        writer.endElement(DIV);

        writer = context.getResponseWriter();
        writer.startElement(DIV, component);
        writer.writeAttribute(ID,component.getClientId(context)+":_second", null );
        writer.write("hello world"+Math.random());
        writer.endElement(DIV);

the resulting ppr response now looks like following:

<update id="myTestComponent">

<![CDATA[<div id="myTestComponent">hello world0.8619488403376933</div>
<div id="myTestComponent:_second">hello world0.25176272071402683</div>]]>

</update>...

Now the problem is, since the update part of the response is already opened the component author cannot really influence the response rendering in any meaningful way (the correct solution would be to issue two update commands here)
Now the javascript has to react on the client side to resolve that situation.

Now MyFaces just replaced the original

myTestComponent

with the update code and hence the result was a div wandering down (aka wrong update)

hello world0.48748236239247755
hello world0.6020541783857698
hello world0.7181842402648805
hello world0.2803064696069696
(after a handful of requests, with the lowest line being the first second div being dran)

now due to being incorrect a user gave me rightfully a bug issue. I dug deeper and ran the same example
against Mojarra, now Mojarra does cherry pick the delivered first div and replaces the original div, and omits the second one.
The Problem is Mojarra just does it for newer browsers, it does the same just updating the original element with the replacement code
(and hence producing a wandering div) for IE6+7-

My question is, first, how to handle that problem correctly. Secondly, is this even a problem for us or more one for the component author?
In the end the main problem would not exist if they ajax api could be used on the component side properly without being enforced already into an update (or to allow nested updates, inserts within an update)

Werner