Question

I have to perform two operations on button click.

1. call a method in a bean which will return a url and it will be set in some variable.

2. after that I have to open that url in another tab. I am using the action attribute of CommandButton and it is setting the URL value correctly, but how do I open that url as pdf in a new tab. i.e “URL of pdf should open in a new tab”

Code sample as follows:

<div class="form-options">
    <h:commandButton value="Download Report" styleClass="btn btn-primary btn-icon buttonCustom" actionListener="#{reportBean.GenerateReport}">
    </h:commandButton>
</div>  

Answer 1

Hope I unterstood you right. This worked for me:

1. Provide the method generating the report and the URL in the actionListener-attribute of the commandButton (what you already did, according to your sample code).
2. Provide the method returning the URL in the action-attribute of the commandButton (it will be called after the actionListener-method).
3. For opening a new tab, add target="_blank in the parent <h:form> (taken from this questions answer)

XHTML-Code:

<h:form target="_blank">
    <h:commandButton value="Show Report" 
                     actionListener="#{reportBean.generateReport}"
                     action="#{reportBean.getUrl}" />
</h:form>

As this approach applies the target="_blank" to all non-ajax calls, here’s another way using Javascript:

<h:form>
    <h:commandButton value="Show Report" 
                     actionListener="#{reportBean.generateReport}"
                     action="#{reportBean.getUrl}" 
                     onclick="this.form.target='_blank'"/>
</h:form>

Java-Code:

public void generateReport(final ActionEvent evt) {
    // ... generating report and setting url-variable
}


public String getUrl() {
    return url;
}

If you have to forward to an external link, see this question