jakartaee / jakartaee/faces

Simplify overriding a component's renderer

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Component: Components/Renderers Priority: Major Type: New Feature
Dominant language
Java
Stars
127
Forks
59
Avg merge
23h
Merged PRs (30d)
7

Description

A component in JSF can be customized by overriding its renderer and creating a new tag for it, e.g as demonstrated here: https://weblogs.java.net/blog/mriem/archive/2013/11/07/jsf-tip-34-override-jsf-renderer-and-create-new-tag-it

This however requires a small but tedious amount of XML. As an analogy to the createTag attribute of FacesComponent a similar attribute on @FacesRenderer could simplify this task and provide a greater ease of use. E.g. the XML in the above referenced example could be replaced by the following:

@FacesRenderer(forComponentType="javax.faces.HtmlOutputText" tagName="myOutputText")
public class MyTextRenderer extends Renderer {
    // ... }

Overriding the render of a component and keeping its existing tag requires roughly the same amount of XML, but less straightforward. It requires the user to find out what the render-kit-id, component-family and renderer-type is of the component for which they want to override. This is demonstrated e.g. here: https://weblogs.java.net/blog/mriem/archive/2013/11/05/jsf-tip-32-override-jsf-renderer

It would be great if this could be simplified to just this:

@FacesRenderer(forComponentType="javax.faces.HtmlOutputText")
public class MyTextRenderer extends Renderer {
    // ... }

As a user often primarily knows a component by its namespace and tag name, it might be worthwhile to let the user alternatively reference the component via this kind of naming. E.g.

@FacesRenderer(forComponentTag="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html:outputText") public class MyTextRenderer extends Renderer {
    // ... }

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reviewing the existing @FacesRenderer and @FacesComponent createTag behavior, then compare the two linked renderer-override examples. Define how a renderer can reference its component by type or namespace/tag and whether it can create a replacement tag; done means the proposed annotation behavior is specified consistently with the existing XML configuration.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
java
Domain
frontend, web-dev
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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