ADF Faces Client Behavior with Attributes

Last month I posted about the basics of creating custom ClientBehavior in ADF Faces. Now it is time to take the next step and enhance that example with ways to set attributes on the JSP client-behavior tag, pass these on to the client-side javascript implementation and use them in the actual functionality.

We'll take the (simplified) example of the previous post that could show a javascript alert and adopt it to get the message from an attribute which we specify in the JSF page using the component. We'll also make sure we can use an EL expression to specify this values (this is the tricky part). We will be able to do something like:

<af:forEach begin="1" end="5" varStatus="vs">
  <af:commandButton text="click to see message #{vs.index}" id="cb">
    <redheap:showAlertBehavior message="This is message #{vs.index}"/>
  </af:commandButton>
</af:forEach>

Custom ADF Faces Client Behavior 11.1.1 JSP tag

This post will show how to create your own ADF Faces client behavior JSP tags which makes them suitable for ADF version 11gR1, also known as version 11.1.1, and version 11gR2 (11.1.2) when not using Facelets.

ADF Faces client behavior tags provide declarative solutions to common client operations that you would otherwise have to write using JavaScript, and register on components as client listeners.

Using tags makes behavior much more reusable. All a page developer has to do is drag-and-drop the client behavior tag on the appropriate component and not worry about writing JavaScript and attaching the appropriate client listeners. ADF Faces 11gR1 has a number of client behavior tags and a couple more were added in version 11.1.2. Some examples are the af:showPopupBehavior to disclose a popup or the af:scrollComponentIntoViewBehavior to scroll the page.

Wouldn't it be great if we can create our own client behavior tags for things that ADF doesn't support out of the box? There are a number of blogs out there that describe something like that, such as placeholder watermarks by Duncan Mills and setting the initial focus component by Donatas Valys. Unfortunately those blogs describe how to do this with facelets which requires JDeveloper 11.1.2 We needed a solution for JDeveloper 11.1.1 and thus JSP tags.

Update: A follow-up post is available that explains how to add support for attributes to your custom client behavior.