Dynamically adding components to a custom composite JSF component

When writing a custom JSF component, you might want to include other components in yours. JSF provides different ways to achieve this, the hard way is to encode-decode the other component you want to include. The easy way is to create and add the component programatically you want to include, to your composite component. For example you want to add a input text component dynamically.

private void encodeInputText(FacesContext context) {
      HtmlInputText inputText = new HtmlInputText();
      inputText.setParent(this);
      inputText.setId(this.getId() + “:_text1”);
      inputText.encodeBegin(context);
      inputText.encodeEnd(context);
}

This code will render an input text to the page, in this example you can also manipulate several properties of the inputText before calling encode, you can set converters, validators, style classes, and other component specific attributes to inputText here without coding html. Calling encode will give this job to the renderer of the inputText.

This was a simple example, if the component being added dynamically renders it’s children you should also check for the getRendersChildren() of the component and call encodeChildren if necessary. I’ve tried the code above many times and did not have any problem, however there seems to be a better alternative to this, an opposite way actually, using

getChildren().add(the_component_to_be_added);

Updated: After adding the child component dynamically, like the first way, the encoding methods must be called in order to render the children.