Calling bean methods with arguments from JSF pages

Question

Is it possible to call bean methods & directly pass parameters to them from the view instead of requiring to first set the bean properties and then call methods without argu

Answer 1

Passing method arguments is supported since EL 2.2 which is part of Servlet 3.0. So if your webapp runs on a Servlet 3.0 compatible container (Tomcat 7, Glassfish 3, etc) with a web.xml declared conform Servlet 3.0 spec (which is likely true as you're using JSF 2.1 which in turn implicitly requires Servlet 3.0), then you will be able to pass method arguments to bean action methods in the following form:

with

public void submit(Long id) {
    // ...
}

You can even pass fullworthy objects along like as:

with

public void submit(Item item) {
    // ...
}

If you were targeting a Servlet 2.5 container, then you could achieve the same by replacing the EL implementation by for example JBoss EL which supports the same construct. See also Invoke direct methods or methods with arguments / variables / parameters in EL.