2009/5/12 Andy Schwartz <andy.schwartz@oracle.com> 

Hi David -

Hi Andy,

Thanks for responding.

David Geary wrote On 5/12/2009 12:36 PM ET:

<h:selectOneMenu id="menu"
                  value="#{place.zoomIndex}"
                  valueChangeListener="#{place.zoomChanged}"
                  style="font-size:13px;font-family:Palatino">
    
  <f:selectItems value="#{places.zoomLevelItems}"/>
  <f:ajax execute="@this" render="image"/>
              
</h:selectOneMenu>

This looks good to me.

Yup. I thought that perhaps I was failing validation for some reason, so I added immediate="true" to the f:ajax tag, but it didn't fix the problem. :(

With FireBug, I've verified that a POST request is indeed executed when I change the zoom level, and it appears that everything is in order:

form    form
j_id-939329235_16ef8569:0:j_id-939329235_16ef8513:j_id1608935764_5fe6690f:menu    3
javax.faces.ViewState    -1363564553004911965:-1863826268811277742
javax.faces.behavior.event    valueChange
javax.faces.partial.ajax    true
javax.faces.partial.event    change
javax.faces.partial.execute    j_id-939329235_16ef8569:0:j_id-939329235_16ef8513:j_id1608935764_5fe6690f:menu
javax.faces.partial.render    j_id-939329235_16ef8569:0:j_id-939329235_16ef8513:j_id1608935764_5fe6690f:image
javax.faces.source    j_id-939329235_16ef8569:0:j_id-939329235_16ef8513:j_id1608935764_5fe6690f:menu

And the request payload looks right - seems like all of the necessary information is present.  (Though, man, those auto-generated client ids sure are huge!)

Yes, it looks right to me too.

I get a response back that looks like this:

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
  <partial-response><changes><update id="javax.faces.ViewState"><![CDATA[1747337848471748955:2683565346534242854
  ]]></update></changes></partial-response>

However, with f:ajax, my value change listener is never invoked on the server, so the menu doesn't update, even though I've specified that the menu should go through the execute phase of the lifecycle.

Does anyone know why my value change listener is not invoked? Am I doing something wrong, or is this a bug?

Seems like the execute portion of the lifecycle is not being invoked properly.  I don't see anything wrong in your code - so I suspect there is a bug here.

I put a phase listener in the app to monitor the lifecycle, and all six phases of the lifecycle are invoked, in the correct order when the ajax request is made, but my value change listener is still not invoked. It's interesting to note that when I remove the f:ajax tag, and add an onchange="submit()" attribute to the menu, my value change listener does get invoked, so it definitely seems like a bug to me. I can't think of any good reason for the difference in behavior between the Ajax and non-Ajax versions.

It seems to me that the lifecycle is executing properly, but it's not processing my menu, even though I've got execute="@this", and that information is apparently correctly passed to the server.

Is anyone from the RI team listening? Ryan? I can JAR up the app, and send it to interested parties. I'd really like to get this fixed so I can nail down this demo for JavaOne. It's a pretty cool demo, but it looses much of its appeal when it doesn't work.

Help!!

btw, here are a couple of interesting datapoints:

1. I have breakpoints in jsf.ajax.request and jsf.ajax.response. The request breakpoint is hit, but the response is not. The return status for the response is 200, so there are apparently no errors.

2. I thought, from Jim Driscoll's blog about f:ajax, that we had to specify client ids for execute and render, so I originally had this:

  <f:ajax execute="@this" render="#{cc.clientId}:image"/>

But when I do that, I get this error...

  <f:ajax> contains an unknown id 'j_id-939329235_16ef8569:0:j_id-939329235_16ef8513:j_id1608935764_5fe6690f:image'

..when I load the page, even though that is the correct client id (as evidenced from the request data above). Evidently, we're supposed to use the component id and not the client id?

When specifying execute/render ids for <f:ajax>, the id resolution behavior is similar to findComponent().  So, if you specify a relative id, eg. "image", this should be resolved relative to the nearest naming container.  In your case, that would be the composite component.  In order to specify an absolute id, you would prefix the id with ":", eg. ":foo:mycompositecomp:image".

Ah, okay, I missed that in the docs. Thanks for the explanation.


david