Question

I have a few hiden fields in my .xhtml page.

<h:inputHidden value="1" id="hidePrev"/>
.....
<h:inputHidden value="1" id="hideNext"/>

And I can’t catch their values from my JSF bean.

public class FacesUtil {
public static Object getMapValue(String key) {
    return FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().getExternalContext().getApplicationMap().get(key);
}

public static void setMapValue(String key, Object value) {
    FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().getExternalContext().getApplicationMap().put(key, value);
}

}

My bean code:

    nextFlag = (String)FacesUtil.getMapValue("hideNext");
    prevFlag = (String)FacesUtil.getMapValue("hidePrev");

Fields nextFlag and prevFlag are still empty. They have getter and setter methods. I’m using JSF 2.2 ver. Please, help me to resolve this problem.

Answer 1

The <h:inputHidden> isn’t intented to add custom request parameters to the form submit. It’s intented to remember already-definied bean properties across postbacks. For adding custom request parameters, you should be using <f:param> in command components or “plain vanilla” <input type="hidden"> instead.

Thus, so

<h:commandButton ...>
    <f:param name="prev" value="1" />
    <f:param name="next" value="1" />
</h:commandButton>

or so

<input type="hidden" name="prev" value="1" />
<input type="hidden" name="next" value="1" />
<h:commandButton ... />

Either way, the values are in a request scoped bean available as

@ManagedProperty("#{param.prev}")
private String prev;

@ManagedProperty("#{param.next}")
private String next;

Or in a broader scoped bean as

String prev = externalContext.getRequestParameterMap().get("prev");
String next = externalContext.getRequestParameterMap().get("next");

Please note that you confused request parameters with application scoped attributes. This is seriously a pretty major mixup which proves that you have no idea what you’re doing. I strongly recommend to take a pause and go through a basic JSF tutorial once again.