spring faces without spring flow

Question

I\'m starting a new JSF (2) project. I realize that pure JSF has some limitation and I\'m planning to drop in spring. JSF is a relatively new approach in spring (there is no

Answer 1

I'm using JSF 2 together with Spring 3 for Dependency Injection etc.

I'm not familiar with Web Flow and I don't use it.

In your faces-config.xml you can register the Spring SpringBeanFacesELResolver.

<el-resolver>
    org.springframework.web.jsf.el.SpringBeanFacesELResolver
</el-resolver>

Then you can access Spring managed beans in your JSF code!

Have a look at the Spring documentation and the API docs.

Answer 2

If you do not have heavy wizard-specific views in your application, I doubt you'll actually need to use SWF.

The easiest solution is actually the one Sebi told you - register the Spring EL Resolver and mark your controller classes with appropriate stereotype (most usually, @Controller) and desired scope. From there on you should be able to get references to Spring-managed beans via manual- or autowiring. And that's all there is to it - no faces-config.xml bean managment and no "double IoC" overhead. Once it's in Spring context, the managed controller is dereferenced easily from facelet via #{} EL-notation.

For example:

TestController.java:

@Controller("myController")
@Scope("request")

public class TestController {

@Autowired
private SomeSpringManagedBean someBean;

private String someViewProperty;

public String getSomeViewProperty() {
       return someViewProperty;
}

public void setSomeViewProperty(String arg) {
       this.someViewProperty = arg;
}

......

}

TestView.jspx:

<p:inputText value="#{myController.someViewProperty}" />

We've lost about 2 weeks trying to tie in SWF together with JSF 1.2 - only to discover that once we actually got it working with the latest version of the IceFaces that support JSF 1.2, the IceFaces had a feature/bug so nasty that it simply wouldn't render the view and had gotten stuck in Phase 5 without throwing any exception or reporting anything useful (the issue became fixed in a 1.8.2-GA version of IceFaces that isn't obtainable without purchasing the license).

EDIT: I noticed basically a similar SO-thread here.