Question

I am passing JSP values to JSF’s backing bean. Once I get the values in bean, then I am trying to assign values to inputText fields with setters method, something like this.

public void testProcess(){

empBean.setEmpName(empBean.getEmpId());

}

testProcess method is called in the action of the JSP page.

My question when I set the value in the bean, my JSF page’s values are not getting populated. Do I need to explicitly refresh my JSF page, if so how could I do that?

Answer 1

Yes, you need to refresh the main page. What happens on the server will not automatically make something happen on the client (browser).

One fairly common pattern for this type of operation is to have the popup do the form post using ajax (easy with many javascript frameworks like jQuery). See http://jquery.malsup.com/form/ for a nice example using the jQuery form plugin. In the response handler for the ajax-call, you reload the main page (using the window.opener property) and close the popup. In the example with the jQuery Form plugin, you would do something like:

<script type="text/javascript"> 
    // wait for the DOM to be loaded 
    $(document).ready(function() { 
        // bind 'myForm' and provide a simple callback function 
        $('#myForm').ajaxForm(function() {    
        // reload main page
        window.opener.location.reload();
        // close popup
        window.close();
        }); 
    }); 
</script> 

The reason you want to submit the form using ajax is that you want to wait to refresh the main page until the post is completed and doing a regular post will cause the popup to reload, which in some browsers will invalidate the window.opener property, making it impossible to reload the main page.