Wizard of X

I ran into an issue with FontAwesome a few months back, where a NoCache header was being injected at the server and FA was broken for any partial refresh. I convinced the admin to reverse that setting and all was well until last week... We had some users who were not getting any icons to appear. Ever. We tracked it down to a new Windows 10 setting for IE11 which disallows untrusted fonts. Since we do not set security protocols for our users, and there is no chance of ever convincing those admins to change this policy that they explicitly turned on, I had to find a new solution. I did some searching and it turned out to not be too difficult. First, here is the original implementation. The theme: <control> <name>Icon.Search</name> <property mode="override"> <name>tagName</name> <value>i</value> </property> <property mode="concat"> <name>styleClass</name> <value>fa fa-search&

I was asked to create a control that would allow users to select the number of rows per page in a view/repeat control (the application uses both). It seemed simple at first, but I ran into a few issues that I thought I'd share the solutions to. Problem 2: When the page refreshed, the combobox value always reverted back to the default It turns out that the Integer value stored in the viewScope doesn't get run through the converter back to a string before being compared to options. I needed a way to calculate the option values so that they would be Integers. This is also not the first time I've run into issues where I need a value to be of a different type, and I see questions like this on StackOverflow from time to time. I attempted a few minor things before I realized I needed to break out my old stand-by, the GetMap . The GetMap is just a fake Map implementation that takes the key and transforms it or uses it to look up some other value. In this case, we are doing the f

I was asked to create a control that would allow users to select the number of rows per page in a view/repeat control (the application uses both). It seemed simple at first, but I ran into a few issues that I thought I'd share the solutions to. First, lets start at the beginning. I went through the relevant design elements and set row="#{viewScope.tableRows}" , and I created an xp:comboBox with value="#{viewScope.tableRows}" and added items for 20, 30, 50, and 100, and I assigned it an onChange event handler that did a partial execution and partial refresh of a div containing the combo box, pager and the table. Then I started fixing all the problems. Problem 1: The combobox value was a string, but the rows parameter requires an integer. This was causing IllegalArgumentException / java.lang.String incompatible with java.lang.Integer. I added a NumberConverter, but this only slightly changed the exception message to java.lang.Long incompatible with java.lang.

I just had a need to do this and a Google search didn't immediately turn up a solution. So I thought for a couple of minutes and came up with this: value="0#{numberVar}" This takes advantage of the way Java auto-converts objects to strings when doing a concatenation. So if your number is 13, Java EL turns this into new String("0"+13), which becomes "013". You can then strip off the leading zero or just parse the string back into a number.

Of course, not everything was an unmitigated success. I tried many things that didn't work out. Much of which I've removed and forgotten about, but a few things remain - either scarred into my psyche or woven too deeply to fix. What didn't work Storing my entire configuration in application.properties Using properties files is great. It let me get configuration out of a profile document and into something much easier to edit - particularly configuration that users will never see or maintain (and thus there is no need for an interface for). But I took it too far. The paths to the other databases are there, and that's good. But view aliases are also there, and that was a mistake. I already have a ViewDefinition enum that describes each view and all the information I need to know about it. I could have set view names there, but instead I'm reading them from the application config. I can change where a view is pointing without having to go into my code. Except of co

Here are some of the techniques I adopted that turned out great. I made no claim to innovation or superiority. What worked? PhaseListener: Having a PhaseListener to let me know where I was in the JSF lifecycle was extremely helpful. I used this information constantly to determine the state of various objects at any given time. In fact, as much as I know it's bad technique to troubleshoot via print statements, I found it invaluable to be able to observe the exact order of state changes. That being said, it's important to note that THE CONSOLE LIES! If you see something very unusual happening, like the lifecycle restarting multiple times or events just never finishing - look at the console log. My experience was that what appeared to be going on in the log was not necessarily what was going on, but if it looked crazy it was an indication that something wasn't right. I don't care if you're trying to go pure Java as I did, or pure SSJS - a PhaseListener is a si