Dynamic JSF subviews

Switch between subviews in one main page

The goal is to be able to switch between multiple JSP include pages in one main page. There are several ways to achieve this. The easiest way would be the following:

<jsp:include page="#{myBean.includePage}" />

But this only works in JSF 1.2 + JSP 2.1, the environment where Unified Expression Language is made available. In older versioned environments the above snippet is not valid.

The trick

You can also access JSF managed beans using the old JSP EL notation ${managedBeanName}! You only have to keep in mind that this doesn't precreate the managed bean automatically when this line is called for the first time. So somewhere in the code before this line you should already have called the managed bean by JSF EL. The following example will work:

<h:panelGroup rendered="#{myBean.includePage != null}">
    <jsp:include page="${myBean.includePage}" />
</h:panelGroup>

Take care: do not use f:subview instead of h:panelGroup. Every include page should have its own f:subview with an unique ID.

The relevant java code of the backing bean MyBean.java should look like:

public String getIncludePage() {
    if (...) { // Do your thing, this is just a basic example with a nasty if-else tree.
        return "include1.jsp";
    } else if (...) {
        return "include2.jsp";
    } else if (...) {
        return "include3.jsp";
    } else {
        return "default.jsp";
    }
}

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(C) January 2007, BalusC