Sometimes, when using <h:commandLink>, <h:commandButton> or <f:ajax>, the action, actionListener or listener method associated with the tag are simply not being invoked. Or, the bean properties are not updated with submitted UIInput values.
What are the possible causes and solutions for this?
Introduction
Whenever an UICommand component (<h:commandXxx>, <p:commandXxx>, etc) fails to invoke the associated action method, or an UIInput component (<h:inputXxx>, <p:inputXxxx>, etc) fails to process the submitted values and/or update the model values, and you aren't seeing any googlable exceptions and/or warnings in the server log, also not when you configure an ajax exception handler as per Exception handling in JSF ajax requests, nor when you set below context parameter in web.xml,
<context-param>
<param-name>javax.faces.PROJECT_STAGE</param-name>
<param-value>Development</param-value>
</context-param>
and you are also not seeing any googlable errors and/or warnings in browser's JavaScript console (press F12 in Chrome/Firefox23+/IE9+ to open the web developer toolset and then open the Console tab), then work through below list of possible causes.
Possible causes
UICommand and UIInput components must be placed inside an UIForm component, e.g. <h:form> (and thus not plain HTML <form>), otherwise nothing can be sent to the server. UICommand components must also not have type="button" attribute, otherwise it will be a dead button which is only useful for JavaScript onclick. See also How to send form input values and invoke a method in JSF bean and <h:commandButton> does not initiate a postback.
You cannot nest multiple UIForm components in each other. This is illegal in HTML. The browser behavior is unspecified. Watch out with include files! You can use UIForm components in parallel, but they won't process each other during submit. You should also watch out with "God Form" antipattern; make sure that you don't unintentionally process/validate all other (invisible) inputs in the very same form (e.g. having a hidden dialog with required inputs in the very same form). See also How to use <h:form> in JSF page? Single form? Multiple forms? Nested forms?.
No UIInput value validation/conversion error should have occurred. You can use <h:messages> to show any messages which are not shown by any input-specific <h:message> components. Don't forget to include the id of <h:messages> in the <f:ajax render>, if any, so that it will be updated as well on ajax requests. See also h:messages does not display messages when p:commandButton is pressed.
If UICommand or UIInput components are placed inside an iterating component like <h:dataTable>, <ui:repeat>, etc, then you need to ensure that exactly the same value of the iterating component is been preserved during the apply request values phase of the form submit request. JSF will reiterate over it to find the clicked link/button and submitted input values. Putting the bean in the view scope and/or making sure that you load the data model in #PostConstruct of the bean (and thus not in a getter method!) should fix it. See also How and when should I load the model from database for h:dataTable.
If UICommand or UIInput components are included by a dynamic source such as <ui:include src="#{bean.include}">, then you need to ensure that exactly the same #{bean.include} value is preserved during the view build time of the form submit request. JSF will reexecute it during building the component tree. Putting the bean in the view scope and/or making sure that you load the data model in #PostConstruct of the bean (and thus not in a getter method!) should fix it. See also How to ajax-refresh dynamic include content by navigation menu? (JSF SPA).
The rendered attribute of the component and all of its parents and the test attribute of any parent <c:if>/<c:when> should not evaluate to false during the apply request values phase of the form submit request. JSF will recheck it as part of safeguard against tampered/hacked requests. Storing the variables responsible for the condition in a #ViewScoped bean or making sure that you're properly preinitializing the condition in #PostConstruct of a #RequestScoped bean should fix it. The same applies to the disabled and readonly attributes of the component, which should not evaluate to true during apply request values phase. See also JSF CommandButton action not invoked, Form submit in conditionally rendered component is not processed, h:commandButton is not working once I wrap it in a <h:panelGroup rendered> and Force JSF to process, validate and update readonly/disabled input components anyway
The onclick attribute of the UICommand component and the onsubmit attribute of the UIForm component should not return false or cause a JavaScript error. There should in case of <h:commandLink> or <f:ajax> also be no JS errors visible in the browser's JS console. Usually googling the exact error message will already give you the answer. See also Manually adding / loading jQuery with PrimeFaces results in Uncaught TypeErrors.
If you're using Ajax via JSF 2.x <f:ajax> or e.g. PrimeFaces <p:commandXxx>, make sure that you have a <h:head> in the master template instead of the <head>. Otherwise JSF won't be able to auto-include the necessary JavaScript files which contains the Ajax functions. This would result in a JavaScript error like "mojarra is not defined" or "PrimeFaces is not defined" in browser's JS console. See also h:commandLink actionlistener is not invoked when used with f:ajax and ui:repeat.
If you're using Ajax, and the submitted values end up being null, then make sure that the UIInput and UICommand components of interest are covered by the <f:ajax execute> or e.g. <p:commandXxx process>, otherwise they won't be executed/processed. See also Submitted form values not updated in model when adding <f:ajax> to <h:commandButton> and Understanding PrimeFaces process/update and JSF f:ajax execute/render attributes.
If the submitted values still end up being null, and you're using CDI to manage beans, then make sure that you import the scope annotation from the correct package, else CDI will default to #Dependent which effectively recreates the bean on every single evaluation of the EL expression. See also #SessionScoped bean looses scope and gets recreated all the time, fields become null and What is the default Managed Bean Scope in a JSF 2 application?
If a parent of the <h:form> with the UICommand button is beforehand been rendered/updated by an ajax request coming from another form in the same page, then the first action will always fail in JSF 2.2 or older. The second and subsequent actions will work. This is caused by a bug in view state handling which is reported as JSF spec issue 790 and currently fixed in JSF 2.3. For older JSF versions, you need to explicitly specify the ID of the <h:form> in the render of the <f:ajax>. See also h:commandButton/h:commandLink does not work on first click, works only on second click.
If the <h:form> has enctype="multipart/form-data" set in order to support file uploading, then you need to make sure that you're using at least JSF 2.2, or that the servlet filter who is responsible for parsing multipart/form-data requests is properly configured, otherwise the FacesServlet will end up getting no request parameters at all and thus not be able to apply the request values. How to configure such a filter depends on the file upload component being used. For Tomahawk <t:inputFileUpload>, check this answer and for PrimeFaces <p:fileUpload>, check this answer. Or, if you're actually not uploading a file at all, then remove the attribute altogether.
Make sure that the ActionEvent argument of actionListener is an javax.faces.event.ActionEvent and thus not java.awt.event.ActionEvent, which is what most IDEs suggest as 1st autocomplete option. Having no argument is wrong as well if you use actionListener="#{bean.method}". If you don't want an argument in your method, use actionListener="#{bean.method()}". Or perhaps you actually want to use action instead of actionListener. See also Differences between action and actionListener.
Make sure that no PhaseListener or any EventListener in the request-response chain has changed the JSF lifecycle to skip the invoke action phase by for example calling FacesContext#renderResponse() or FacesContext#responseComplete().
Make sure that no Filter or Servlet in the same request-response chain has blocked the request fo the FacesServlet somehow. For example, login/security filters such as Spring Security. Particularly in ajax requests that would by default end up with no UI feedback at all. See also Spring Security 4 and PrimeFaces 5 AJAX request handling.
If you are using a PrimeFaces <p:dialog> or a <p:overlayPanel>, then make sure that they have their own <h:form>. Because, these components are by default by JavaScript relocated to end of HTML <body>. So, if they were originally sitting inside a <form>, then they would now not anymore sit in a <form>. See also p:commandbutton action doesn't work inside p:dialog
Bug in the framework. For example, RichFaces has a "conversion error" when using a rich:calendar UI element with a defaultLabel attribute (or, in some cases, a rich:placeholder sub-element). This bug prevents the bean method from being invoked when no value is set for the calendar date. Tracing framework bugs can be accomplished by starting with a simple working example and building the page back up until the bug is discovered.
Debugging hints
In case you still stucks, it's time to debug. In the client side, press F12 in webbrowser to open the web developer toolset. Click the Console tab so see the JavaScript conosle. It should be free of any JavaScript errors. Below screenshot is an example from Chrome which demonstrates the case of submitting an <f:ajax> enabled button while not having <h:head> declared (as described in point 7 above).
Click the Network tab to see the HTTP traffic monitor. Submit the form and investigate if the request headers and form data and the response body are as per expectations. Below screenshot is an example from Chrome which demonstrates a successful ajax submit of a simple form with a single <h:inputText> and a single <h:commandButton> with <f:ajax execute="#form" render="#form">.
(warning: when you post screenshots from HTTP request headers like above from a production environment, then make sure you scramble/obfuscate any session cookies in the screenshot to avoid session hijacking attacks!)
In the server side, make sure that server is started in debug mode. Put a debug breakpoint in a method of the JSF component of interest which you expect to be called during processing the form submit. E.g. in case of UICommand component, that would be UICommand#queueEvent() and in case of UIInput component, that would be UIInput#validate(). Just step through the code execution and inspect if the flow and variables are as per expectations. Below screenshot is an example from Eclipse's debugger.
If your h:commandLink is inside a h:dataTable there is another reason why the h:commandLink might not work:
The underlying data-source which is bound to the h:dataTable must also be available in the second JSF-Lifecycle that is triggered when the link is clicked.
So if the underlying data-source is request scoped, the h:commandLink does not work!
While my answer isn't 100% applicable, but most search engines find this as the first hit, I decided to post it nontheless:
If you're using PrimeFaces (or some similar API) p:commandButton or p:commandLink, chances are that you have forgotten to explicitly add process="#this" to your command components.
As the PrimeFaces User's Guide states in section 3.18, the defaults for process and update are both #form, which pretty much opposes the defaults you might expect from plain JSF f:ajax or RichFaces, which are execute="#this" and render="#none" respectively.
Just took me a looong time to find out. (... and I think it's rather unclever to use defaults that are different from JSF!)
I would mention one more thing that concerns Primefaces's p:commandButton!
When you use a p:commandButton for the action that needs to be done on the server, you can not use type="button" because that is for Push buttons which are used to execute custom javascript without causing an ajax/non-ajax request to the server.
For this purpose, you can dispense the type attribute (default value is "submit") or you can explicitly use type="submit".
Hope this will help someone!
Got stuck with this issue myself and found one more cause for this problem.
If you don't have setter methods in your backing bean for the properties used in your *.xhtml , then the action is simply not invoked.
I recently ran into a problem with a UICommand not invoking in a JSF 1.2 application using IBM Extended Faces Components.
I had a command button on a row of a datatable (the extended version, so <hx:datatable>) and the UICommand would not fire from certain rows from the table (the rows that would not fire were the rows greater than the default row display size).
I had a drop-down component for selecting number of rows to display. The value backing this field was in RequestScope. The data backing the table itself was in a sort of ViewScope (in reality, temporarily in SessionScope).
If the row display was increased via the control which value was also bound to the datatable's rows attribute, none of the rows displayed as a result of this change could fire the UICommand when clicked.
Placing this attribute in the same scope as the table data itself fixed the problem.
I think this is alluded to in BalusC #4 above, but not only did the table value need to be View or Session scoped but also the attribute controlling the number of rows to display on that table.
I had this problem as well and only really started to hone in on the root cause after opening up the browser's web console. Until that, I was unable to get any error messages (even with <p:messages>). The web console showed an HTTP 405 status code coming back from the <h:commandButton type="submit" action="#{myBean.submit}">.
In my case, I have a mix of vanilla HttpServlet's providing OAuth authentication via Auth0 and JSF facelets and beans carrying out my application views and business logic.
Once I refactored my web.xml, and removed a middle-man-servlet, it then "magically" worked.
Bottom line, the problem was that the middle-man-servlet was using RequestDispatcher.forward(...) to redirect from the HttpServlet environment to the JSF environment whereas the servlet being called prior to it was redirecting with HttpServletResponse.sendRedirect(...).
Basically, using sendRedirect() allowed the JSF "container" to take control whereas RequestDispatcher.forward() was obviously not.
What I don't know is why the facelet was able to access the bean properties but could not set them, and this clearly screams for doing away with the mix of servlets and JSF, but I hope this helps someone avoid many hours of head-to-table-banging.
I had lots of fun debugging an issue where a <h:commandLink>'s action in richfaces datatable refused to fire. The table used to work at some point but stopped for no apparent reason. I left no stone unturned, only to find out that my rich:datatable was using the wrong rowKeyConverter which returned nulls that richfaces happily used as row keys. This prevented my <h:commandLink> action from getting called.
One more possibility: if the symptom is that the first invocation works, but subsequent ones do not, you may be using PrimeFaces 3.x with JSF 2.2, as detailed here: No ViewState is sent.
I fixed my problem with placing the:
<h:commandButton class="btn btn-danger" value = "Remove" action="#{deleteEmployeeBean.delete}"></h:commandButton>
In:
<h:form>
<h:commandButton class="btn btn-danger" value = "Remove" action="#{deleteEmployeeBean.delete}"></h:commandButton>
</h:form>
This is the solution, which is worked for me.
<p:commandButton id="b1" value="Save" process="userGroupSetupForm"
actionListener="#{userGroupSetupController.saveData()}"
update="growl userGroupList userGroupSetupForm" />
Here, process="userGroupSetupForm" atrribute is mandatory for Ajax call. actionListener is calling a method from #ViewScope Bean. Also updating growl message, Datatable: userGroupList and Form: userGroupSetupForm.
<ui:composition>
<h:form id="form1">
<p:dialog id="dialog1">
<p:commandButton value="Save" action="#{bean.method1}" /> <!--Working-->
</p:dialog>
</h:form>
<h:form id="form2">
<p:dialog id="dialog2">
<p:commandButton value="Save" action="#{bean.method2}" /> <!--Not Working-->
</p:dialog>
</h:form>
</ui:composition>
To solve;
<ui:composition>
<h:form id="form1">
<p:dialog id="dialog1">
<p:commandButton value="Save" action="#{bean.method1}" /> <!-- Working -->
</p:dialog>
<p:dialog id="dialog2">
<p:commandButton value="Save" action="#{bean.method2}" /> <!--Working -->
</p:dialog>
</h:form>
<h:form id="form2">
<!-- .......... -->
</h:form>
</ui:composition>
I have a complex page with a p:commanButton with actionListener and immediate="true"
Upon clicking this commandButton, I need to process a single inputField(thus skipping rest of the form). The problem is, that the inputField has a validator which I'd like to use only in full page submit.
<p:inputText id="#{cc.attr.id2}_input" value="#{myBB.value}"
immediate="true">
<f:validateLength minimum="4"/>
</p:inputText>
<p:commandButton id="#{cc.attr.id2}_search" immediate="true"
process="#{cc.attr.id2}_input #this"
actionListener="#{myBB.listener}">
</p:commandButton>
When I do this with i.e. 3 letters in the inputText, the myBB.value is not updated because of the failed validation. So I'd like to disable the validator for the inputField for the immediate processing by the commandButton. But I don't know how.
I know I can get the value from the ExternalContext, but this seems like a very hacky solution to me(and in my case is not even applicable, because it's inside composite component and I have no way of knowing the clientId of the textField.)
I also know about disabled attribute of the validator tag, but I have no idea how could I put that to use in this situation.
EDIT: I've changed a code a bit, because the IDs I'm using are actually not as simple as I first stated and don't allow me to use simple proposed solution.
I use Mojarra 2.2.4 and Primefaces 4.0
So, first of all, you haven't got the problem with immediate, but rather with <f:validateLength> validator.
That is, to rephrase your question, you'd like to skip validation of a given component in case the particular button is clicked.
Depending on whether you are on Mojarra 2.1.18+ or not there are two solutions. The first one is quite straightforward: use the disabled attribute of <f:validateLength>, while the other one takes into account issue 1492. As we've nowadays have advanced past the aforementioned version of Mojarra, I'll post the first and easier solution, otherwise, scroll through the excellent answers to Why does f:validateDoubleRange only work for #SessionScoped? and Disabled attribute of <f:validateLength> does not evaluate request parameters by BalusC.
So, the solution is the following:
<h:form id="formId">
<p:inputText id="inputId" value="#{myBB.value}">
<f:validateLength minimum="4" disabled=#{not empty param['formId:buttonId']}" />
</p:inputText>
<p:commandButton id="button" process="#this inputId" actionListener="#{myBB.listener}" />
</h:form>
As a side note, you can see that I didn't use immediate attribute at all because I supposed that you abused it to perform a given task. With the rise of AJAX in particular within JSF-based applications you can now easily group a subset of input elements validation by specifying the process attribute of <p:commandButton> or <p:ajax> instead of the previously used prioritized validation especially in synchronous requests. Only those components whose ids are supplied will be processed on the server and all other components will be omitted prom processing lifecycle. Also note that process="#this ..." is also mandatory to execute actions associated with the button itseld.
Regarding the appropriate usage of immediate I'd strongly suggest to refer to the classics: Debug JSF lifecycle blog post by BalusC to check whether you've used it correctly.
Yesterday I was trying to implement a Listener for a SelectManyListbox using Ajax in JSF 2.
Following code is from my memory, since I dont have it available right now :-)
<h:head>
<title>Test</title>
</h:head>
<h:body>
<h:selectManyListbox value="#{myBean.myList}">
<f:ajax render="delete" listener="#{myBean.listener}" />
<h:selectManyListbox>
<h:commandbutton id="delete" disabled="#{myBean.disabled}" value="Delete" />
<h:body>
I tried a lot of different things because my listener was never called. In the end I just added a surrounding <h:form> tag and everything worked. Why is that?
My goal is a composite-control that just displays a list and enables/disables the delete-button when a item is selected/unselected. In my understanding a form is only needed when I want to submit multiple values at once.
Thanks
In my understanding a form is only needed when I want to submit multiple values at once.
This is thus untrue. A <h:form> is necessary when you want to send a POST request to the server by JSF by an UIInput component such as <h:selectManyListbox>. This is regardless of whether the POST request is performed by a regular (synchronous) request or an ajaxical (asynchronous) request. This is regardless of the amount of inputs. You should not forget that the javax.faces.ViewState hidden input field and if necessary also the name=value of the command button itself also needs to be sent along as well, so there's basically never means of a single input value in a JSF postback request.
POST has the major advantage over GET that there's no limit in the amount of data which can be sent. In GET this is dependent on the webbrowser used and ranges from 255 characters until 2~4KB in older browsers and 8~10KB in newer browsers. In POST the limit is usually around 2GB.
I want to update a part of a page by PPR.
This is the part of page that i want to update:
<h:panelGroup id="aggiungiAuto"
rendered="#{!autoBean.operazioneOk}">
<ui:include src="../component/aggiungi_auto.xhtml"/>
</h:panelGroup>
While this is the commandButton present in aggiungi_auto.xhtml
<p:commandButton value="Submit"
update="growl aggiungiAuto aggiungiFoto"
actionListener="#{autoBean.insert}"/>
Any Idea?
JS/Ajax works on the client side, not on the server side. JSF works on the server side, not on the client side. When you instruct JSF to not render the component to HTML, then nothing will be present in the client side, so JS/Ajax will be unable to locate the HTML element to refresh/update.
You need to wrap it in another <h:panelGroup>.
<h:panelGroup id="aggiungiAuto">
<h:panelGroup rendered="#{!autoBean.operazioneOk}">
<ui:include src="../component/aggiungi_auto.xhtml"/>
</h:panelGroup>
</h:panelGroup>
This way the <span id="aggiuniAuto"> is always present in the client side, so JS/Ajax will be able to update it with the new HTML data generated by JSF.
So I was having this kind of a problem with PrimeFaces (the above answer not being sufficient this time), and I also discovered a solution.
Part of the problem I think was that I was using ui:include recursively. For whatever reason, PrimeFaces was irrationally causing UI components to be bound to the backend data out-of-sync; e.g., when an "Add" button was clicked, a new value would be created in the UI, but then the data for it would be ripped out of the values for the section below, etc...
The explanation? "[O]n a viewscoped bean, a hidden field is added to the form to hold post-back data[;] if that field is not included with the process, then the bean will lose context." This particular problem is prevalent with ui:include recursion especially. Solution (all regarding the p:commandButton or other actionable component):
Ensure that update and process are pointing to a JSF component, not a regular HTML component.
update the next scope up if it breaks (goes out-of-sync with the binding).
Use styleClass's for update (not e.g. PF ID's or #this:#parent kind of stuff), so that jQuery is utilized instead of PF, e.g.: #(.fieldset-class).
process whatever scope is being updated. (This is needed for the post-back data so that the Bean keeps its context for the update...) process="#this" is not needed here, provided that the button is contained by the process value component.
For all buttons without validation wanted, set immediate="true".
If none of the above works (which happened with the Add buttons, probably due to ui:include recursion), set process="#this", immediate="true", and update="#none", and then oncomplete="remoteCommandName();", and have a p:remoteCommand instead with that name with the process, immediate, and update mentioned in the above points.
If none of the above works (which happened with some other buttons, probably due to being yet another layer deeper in the ui:include recursion)... wrap a h:panelGroup around the next c:forEach up and then update the PrimeFaces ID of that in the button itself while keeping its remoteCommand call afterwards, as specified above.
If none of the above works (which happened yet again to me)... Try the following code:
In the p:commandButton(s): oncomplete="$('.FixButtonSC').click();"
In the p:fieldset with a style class of FieldsetSC:
<!-- Fix (hidden) button. -->
<p:commandButton id="FixButton" styleClass="FixButtonSC"
process="#this" update="#(.FieldsetSC)" style="display: none;" />
Hope that helps...
sorry if I am being thick but what is the execute="#all" in an f:ajax tag really supposed to do? I expected it to submit all the elements on a page but it seems to POST only the values in the enclosing form, not all forms on page.
For example
<h:body>
<h:form id="form1">
Input1/Form1 <h:inputText id="testinput" value="#{testBean.input1}" />
</h:form>
<h:form id="form2">
Input2/form2 <h:inputText id="testinput2" value="#{testBean.input2}" />
<h:commandButton value="Ok" actionListener="#{testBean.al}">
<f:ajax execute="#all" />
</h:commandButton>
</h:form>
</h:body>
Only form2 is posted on click.
Using mojarra 2.0.2..
The execute="#all" was just a major oversight during designing JSF2 spec. JSF kind of abstracted away too much of its HTML form based nature, forgetting that it's ultimately actually a HTML code generator.
In HTML, submitting a different form than the enclosing one is disallowed. So execute="#all" will never work from that perspective on. It will behave exactly the same as execute="#form". Given that JSF is just a HTML code generator, the same "problem" will hit JSF too. It's not possible to process multiple <h:form> components at once.
If you really need to have this feature for some reason, you should take a step back and reconsider the incorrect way how you look at HTML forms. You need to make sure your forms are designed in such way that you never need information from another form.
See also:
How to use <h:form> in JSF page? Single form? Multiple forms? Nested forms?.
PrimeFaces already realized early that #all was fundamentally wrong. That's exactly why they never supported #all in process attribute, their equivalent of execute. They initially also never supported #all in update, their equivalent of render. However, the only real world use case where that made sense was handling a full error page during an ajax exception, so they ultimately brought update="#all" back after I created the FullAjaxExceptionHandler. The process="#all" will still have exactly the same effect as process="#form".
However, the very same PrimeFaces library also unintentionally made the imagined behavior of execute="#all" possible via its later introduced partialSubmit="true" feature whereby you explicitly specify all other forms like below (the PFS #(form) is just for simplification, a hardcoded collection like :formId1 :formId2 :formId3 etc is also just possible).
<p:commandButton ... process="#(form)" partialSubmit="true" />
This works because partialSubmit="true" prepares the process="xxx" at client side rather than server side. In other words, instead of sending the entire enclosing form from server to client and then processing the specified inputs, it sends only the specified inputs from server to client and then processes them all. Do note that when partialSubmit is absent or set to false, then it would still only send the enclosing form. This misbehavior should rather not be relied upon. They may fix this misbehavior on their side sooner or later.
See also:
Any significant technical difference between JSF non-AJAX submit and a "#all" AJAX submit?
Understanding PrimeFaces process/update and JSF f:ajax execute/render attributes
Here is a quote from JavaServer Faces 2.0 - The complete reference, page 352:
The execute and render keywords accept a set of special keywords, each with the meaning shown in this table:
#all (using with execute): Every component on the page is submitted and processed. This is useful when you want to do a full-page submit.
I think this quite clearly states that the fields from all forms should be submitted with the AJAX request.
However, even with Mojarra 2.0.3 this doesn't happen. Despite of contents of the execute attribute (whether you put a list of forms or #all) only the enclosing form gets its' fields submitted. So this seems like a bug. I am raising an issue about this unless there are altering views?
It would have to be execute=":form1 form2" (if you have the default separator), but anyway no, it doesn't. It only sends the second one.
If you put #all in the first form, it only sends the first. At least on Safari 5/Firefox 3.6.3 anyway. I guess one would have to look at the mojarra javascript to find out more.
Have you tried this?
<f:ajax execute="form1 form2" />
Does it send both forms' data if you explicitly mention them?
AFAIK, you are right: #all represents the whole page.