ploinFaces

KickStart

With ploinFaces you can define flows for your JSF-Application. A flow has several views (xhtml or JSP or something different) and attributes (ManagedBeans). If you leave a flow, the framework removes the attributes from the session. It works with the standard http-session scope. You need no special conversation scope.

Dependencys

At a minimum, to use ploinFaces you need:

log4j-1.2.13.jar
commons-logging-api-1.1.jar
commons-logging-1.1.jar
jsf-api.jar OR myfaces-api.jar
jsf-impl.jar OR myfaces-impl.jar
servlet-api.jar
dom4j-1.6.1.jar
jaxen-1.1.1.jar

If you have set up a JSF-App. this APIs should already been in your Classpath.

Download

Download the ploinFaces.jar from sourceForge and add it to your Classpath.

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=228979

Configuration

To set up the Framework you have to add the BackNavigationHandler from ploinFaces to your faces-config.xml.

<application>

  <system-event-listener>

    <system-event-listener-class>
       org.ploin.web.faces.core.PhaseListenerInstallationListener
    </system-event-listener-class>

    <system-event-class>
       javax.faces.event.PostConstructApplicationEvent
    </system-event-class>

  </system-event-listener>

  <navigation-handler>
    org.ploin.web.faces.core.BackNavigationHandler
  </navigation-handler>

</application>

Bean-Definition

The managedBean you are using in a flow, should be in the session scope. PloinFaces is not responsible for the cration of the beans. For the creation and managing of your managedBeans you can use the standard JSF-Bean-Container configured in the faces-config.xml.

    <managed-bean>

      <managed-bean-name>logInOutBean</managed-bean-name>

      <managed-bean-class>org.company.project.java.gui.model.LogInOutBean</managed-bean-class>

      <managed-bean-scope>session</managed-bean-scope>

    </managed-bean>

Flow-Definition

ploinFaces expects the flow definition in a file "ploinFlows.xml" in your src-folder, where normaly your "*.java" files, hibernate.properties and log4j.properties are placed, too. Here is an example for a flow with three pages. The Managed-Bean "logInOutBean" has session scope.

<flows xmlns="http://www.ploinfaces.org/schema"

 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

 xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.ploinfaces.org/schema http://www.ploinfaces.org/schema/ploinFlows_1.4.xml.xsd">

  <flow id="loginFlow">

    <views>

      <view>/login.xhtml</view>

      <view>/page/help/agbLogin.xhtml</view>

      <view>/page/help/haftungLogin.xhtml</view>

    </views>

    <attributes>

      <attribute>logInOutBean</attribute>

    </attributes>

  </flow>

</flows>

If you leave the flow, ploinFaces removes the logInOutBean from the session. Furthermore you can use java-regex for the views. Here is the next example.

<flows xmlns="http://www.ploinfaces.org/schema"

 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

 xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.ploinfaces.org/schema http://www.ploinfaces.org/schema/ploinFlows_1.4.xml.xsd">

  <flow id="useradministrationFlow">

    <views>

      <view>/page/useradmin.*</view>

    </views>

    <attributes>

      <attribute>useradminBean</attribute>

      <attribute>secureBean</attribute>

    </attributes>

  </flow>

</flows>

Every View starting with "/page/useradmin" is part of the flow.