Question

I would like to add a tooltip for each element in a p:selectManyCheckBox. However I can’t come up with a solution.

I’ve got a class Role that has 3 properties, “id” (Long), “name” (String) and “description” (String). The name is displayed and I would like to have the description as a tooltip.

This is a working piece of code:

<p:selectManyCheckbox layout="pageDirection" value="#{roleBean.selectedRoles}" converter="roleConverter">
    <f:selectItems value="#{roleBean.roles}" var="role" itemLabel="#{role.name}" itemValue="#{role}"/>
</p:selectManyCheckbox>

The roleConverter is a FacesConverter that converts the Role to an id and visa versa.

I came up with this:

<p:selectManyCheckbox layout="pageDirection" value="#{roleBean.selectedRoles}" converter="roleConverter">
    <c:forEach var="role" items="#{roleBean.roles}">
        <f:selectItem id="role#{role.id}" itemLabel="#{role.name}" itemValue="#{role}" />
        <p:tooltip for="role#{role.id}" value="#{role.description}"/>
    </c:forEach>
</p:selectManyCheckbox>

But unfortunately it doesn’t work.

Answer 1

You can achieve this by using the SelectItem#getDescription() property as below:

<p:selectManyCheckbox layout="pageDirection"
    value="#{roleBean.selectedRoles}" converter="roleConverter">
    <f:selectItems value="#{roleBean.roles}" var="role" 
        itemValue="#{role}" itemLabel="#{role.name}" 
        itemDescription="#{role.description}" />
</p:selectManyCheckbox>

This is supported since PrimeFaces 6.2 (actually because of this very answer you’re reading now).

In case you’re not on PrimeFaces 6.2 yet and cannot upgrade for some reason, then you need to manually override the PrimeFaces SelectManyCheckboxRenderer#encodeOptionLabel() as below in order to recognize and render it:

public class YourSelectManyCheckboxRenderer extends SelectManyCheckboxRenderer {

    @Override
    protected void encodeOptionLabel(FacesContext context, SelectManyCheckbox checkbox, String containerClientId, SelectItem option, boolean disabled) throws IOException {
        ResponseWriter writer = context.getResponseWriter();
        writer.startElement("label", null);
        writer.writeAttribute("for", containerClientId, null);

        if (option.getDescription() != null) {
            writer.writeAttribute("title", option.getDescription(), null);
        }

        if (disabled) {
            writer.writeAttribute("class", "ui-state-disabled", null);
        }

        if (option.isEscape()) {
            writer.writeText(option.getLabel(), null);
        } else {
            writer.write(option.getLabel());
        }

        writer.endElement("label");
    }

}

Which is registered as follows in faces-config.xml:

<render-kit>
    <renderer>
        <component-family>org.primefaces.component</component-family>
        <renderer-type>org.primefaces.component.SelectManyCheckboxRenderer</renderer-type>
        <renderer-class>com.example.YourSelectManyCheckboxRenderer</renderer-class>
    </renderer>
</render-kit>