Question

How to display a custom property using facelet expression language?

For example:

<h:outputText value="#{contact.customTypeProperty}" />

where customTypeProperty is of type CustomClass, and I want to display the String returned by its toString()?

Answer 1

That should already be the default behaviour. You don’t need to change anything on the given code example, assuming that the toString() method is properly implemented on the CustomClass. However, if it returns HTML, you’d need to add escape="false" to the output text to prevent JSF from auto-escaping it (which it does in order to prevent XSS attacks on user-controlled input):

<h:outputText value="#{contact.customTypeProperty}" escape="false" />

This is however not necessarily the best practice. You should control the presentation in the view side, not in a toString() in the model side. For example, assuming that CustomClass has in turn two properties foo and bar and you’d like to present it in a table:

<h:panelGrid columns="2">
    <h:outputText value="Foo" />
    <h:outputText value="#{contact.customTypeProperty.foo}" />

    <h:outputText value="Bar" />
    <h:outputText value="#{contact.customTypeProperty.bar}" />
</h:panelGrid>

If you did this to avoid code repetition, then you should actually be using an include file or a tag file. See also When to use <ui:include>, tag files, composite components and/or custom components?