Question

In current project I need to create a panel that will contain an HTML content created by the user elsewhere in the application. This content can be easily inserted like this:

<h:outputText value="#{myBean.dynamicHTMLContent}" escape="false"/>

An example content:

<p>User text</p>

Now we need to give the user more freedom and allow him to use tokens in the HTML code that will be resolved by the application later:

<p>User text</p><p>User image: {niceImage}</p>

The application parses user content in myBean.dynamicHTMLContent and replaces {niceImage(param)} with

<a4j:mediaOutput element="img" createContent="{myBean.generateNiceImage}"/>

This is already a facelet snippet and cannot be evaluated and rendered in h:outputText.

I was looking for a good way to include this kind of dynamic content within a facelet at the stage when EL expressions are not yet evaluated. Something like

<ui:include src="src"/>

but for dynamic components would be the best solution.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Eventually I took the easy way by replacing all custom (curly braces) tokens in the user HTML with corresponding JSF elements and generating a temporary ui:composition facelet file:

public String getUserHtmlContentPath() {

   File temp = File.createTempFile("userContent", ".tmp");
   temp.deleteOnExit();

   FileWriter fw = new FileWriter(temp);
   fw.write(getUserHtmlContentComposition());
   fw.close();

   return "file://" + temp.getAbsolutePath(); 
}

and in the parent facelet:

<ui:include src="#{myBean.userHtmlContentPath}"/>