ViewController for navigated-to page is not added to the request map until bean is referenced in RenderResponse phase.

• Key: SHALE-307
• Type: Bug
• Status: Resolved
• Resolution: Fixed
• Priority: Major
• Assignee: Craig McClanahan
• Reporter: Jonathan Baker
• Component/s: View
• Affects Version/s: 1.0.3
• Fix Version/s: 1.0.4

Environment

linux
tomcat5.5.19
java 1.5.02

Description

I currently have a page with a list of items on it. For each line, there is a link to select one of the items. When an item is selected, the action method bound to that link fetches the item from a database and retruns an outcome that has a navigation rule to navigate to a item detail page. Based on some values in that item, we would like to display a message to the user. I initally added those methods in the prerender method of the view controller of the item detail page. It looks though that prerender in the case described above is not being called on the view controller of the detail page because at the time of beforeRenderResponse phase the ViewController for the new page has not been added to the request scope map.

The ViewController doesn't actually get added to the request map until the first reference to it is found when parsing the jsp page components which occurs sometime during the RenderResponse jsf phase.

The prerender plug point is essentially useless. It will get called anytime I take an action that stays on the current page, but when navigating from one page to another, it will never get called.

Comments

[Craig McClanahan]

Jonathan, could you please try your test case against a recent nightly build[1]? The reason I ask is that this issue has been addressed in the current code (so it'll be fixed in 1.0.4), and I have added some test cases to verify that it does indeed work. (The reason it now works, by the way, is that Shale's custom ViewHandler ensures the view controller managed bean, if there is one, is instantiated and placed in request scope whenever an old view is restored or a new view is created, so it will be in scope already when prerender is called.)

NOTE -- in the nightly build code, the view controller stuff has been factored out of shale-core-xxxxx.jar, so you'll need to add shale-view-xxxxx.jar to your webapp as well as replacing the othe Shale jars.

[1] http://shale.apache.org/index.html#download

[Craig McClanahan]

As far as I can tell, all issues with ViewController events for navigated-to pages are operating correctly (nightly build 20061020, and will be included in 1.0.4), so I'm marking this issue as fixed. Please reopen if you still have problems with the current code.

I attempted this with a build from 10/18 and my problem is still happening.

In my action method I return "display_item"

I have a navigation rule like this:

    <navigation-rule>
        <navigation-case>
            <from-outcome>display_item</from-outcome>
            <to-view-id>/selectionItem.jsp</to-view-id>
        </navigation-case>
    </navigation-rule>

I have a spring bean defined in my application context file:

<bean id="selectionItem" class="...SelectionItemViewController" scope="request">

(using spring 2.0-final)

When the before render response phase is triggered, my view controller is still not in the request map, so prerender is not called on my view controller. Later, when the first reference to my view controller is parsed in the jsp page, the view controller is loaded.

[Jonathan Baker]

   [[ Old comment, sent from unregistered email on Wed, 18 Oct 2006 15:29:18 -0400 ]]

Sure, thank you very much. I will let you know if it resolves my issue.



JB