Question

I’m trying to use the primefaces dataExporter to export some data and I have a column that has a persons name and the name is a link to an external website.

Originally I had the following code and then I found this thread which says that h:commandLink is now supported by dataExporter

<p:dataTable var="inv" value="#{personBacker.investigators}" id="tbl" rows="50" effect="true">

    <p:column filterBy="#{inv.name}" headerText="Investigator" filterMatchMode="contains">
        <h:outputLink value="http://example.com/">
            <h:outputText value="#{inv.name}" />
        </h:outputLink>
    </p:column>

</p:dataTable>

Then I changed my code to this, but now the link doesn’t take me to example.com. From what i found on the interwebs, the commandLink can only use an EL Expression I think.

 <p:dataTable var="inv" value="#{personBacker.investigators}" id="tbl" rows="50" effect="true">

        <p:column filterBy="#{inv.name}" headerText="Investigator" filterMatchMode="contains">
            <p:commandLink action="http://example.com" value="#{inv.name}" />
        </p:column>

    </p:dataTable>

How can I link to an external site using the h:commandLink or p:commandLink tag?

Answer 1

I don’t know if my suggestion will work in your set-up with the DataExporter but to call an external link from a commandLink/commandButton I use the following in my set-up:

<p:commandLink value="external link" ajax="false" action="#{bean.externalLink()}" />

Bean:

public void externalLink() throws IOException {

    ExternalContext ec = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().getExternalContext();
    // call external link
    String link = "http://www.google.com";
    ec.redirect(link); 
}

Another approach would be trying to set the link as html-tag directly. It schouldn’t be too hard as for you showed in your code that the URL is already known:

<a href="http://www.example.com">#{inv.name}</a>

I hope this helped, have Fun!