JavaServer Faces

A Renderer for Encoding Only

Let’s start with a renderer that only deals with encoding—no decoding. The only standard renderer for the UIData component (i.e., the component that represents tabular data) is a renderer that represents the component as an HTML table. Quite often, though, an application needs to render tabular data horizontally: for instance, as a navigation bar with page number links to individual pages in a large query result, as shown in Figure 13-1.

Figure 13-1. Reports lists area with page navigation links

Figure 13-1 shows a new version of the reports list area from the sample application with a page links bar in addition to the first, previous, next, and last page button we used earlier.

To develop and use this custom renderer, there are three things you must do: implement the renderer class, register the renderer class with JSF, and implement a JSP custom action that represents a UIData component equipped with the custom renderer.

The new component/renderer combination bound to a data model containing beans representing each report list page can then be added to the original report list area page to renderer the page links bar. Let’s take it step by step, starting with the renderer class.

The Renderer class

The links in Figure 13-1 are generated with a custom renderer for the UIData component named com.mycompany.jsf.render.BarRenderer. Just as for the standard table ...