Question

I am creating a simple web application to try out JSF2 with PrimeFaces, so far really impressed by how much it can do out of the box. Going through various tutorials and articles I have a question about properties in templates and whether it is possible to insert these.

I know I can insert chunks of HTML content in templates, for example:

<title>
  <ui:insert name="title">Default Title</ui:insert>
</title>

But in some cases it would be useful to insert at property level. The specific one I thought of was TabMenu, where if you were using a TabMenu for navigation (and you want the same TabMenu on every page so it makes sense to use a template), you would want to set the ‘activeIndex’ differently depending on which page you were looking at. This however does not seem to work in a template file:

<p:tabMenu <ui:insert name="activeIndex">activeIndex="0"</ui:insert>>
  <p:menuitem value="Overview" outcome="main" icon="ui-icon-star"/>
  <p:menuitem value="Demos" outcome="demos" icon="ui-icon-search" />
  <p:menuitem value="Documentation" outcome="docs" icon="ui-icon-document"/>
</p:tabMenu>

Hope that makes sense. Is there a way to do this, or is this design just completely wrong and there is a much better way of doing it?

Answer 1

Pass it as <ui:param>.

E.g. in template client:

<ui:composition template="/WEB-INF/templates/some.xhtml">
    <ui:param name="activeIndex" value="0" />

    ...
</ui:composition>

and in master template:

<p:tabMenu activeIndex="#{activeIndex}">