Changing Browser URL from backing bean

I would like to be able to change the text in the url bar to reflect the cur开发者_StackOverflow社区rent state of my app (like GMail does).

Mainly i'm referring to changing the url parameters to reflect the values in my form. (Once a user enters a parameter I would like to change the url parameter that corresponds)

Any idea on how to do that?

Thanks!

To the point, you want fire a HTTP GET request instead of a HTTP POST request. Changing the view side is trivial, use

<form action="targetpage.jsf">

instead of

<h:form>

In the managed bean which is associated with targetpage.jsf you however need to do a bit more changes. JSF 1.2 doesn't offer facilities to set GET request parameters for you by the view declaration, nor does it convert/validate the parameters (JSF 2.0 has <f:viewParam> for this).

You need to gather/convert/validate all request parameters yourself in the constructor and/or @PostConstruct of the backing bean and invoke the action over there as well. There are basically two ways to gather the parameters:

• Define the parameter as <managed-property> of the <managed-bean> in faces.config.xml so that JSF will set it for you.

  E.g.

  <h:inputText id="input" />
  

  (which will generate <input type="text" id="input" name="input" /> in HTML, it's the name attribute which is been used as request parameter name; rightclick page in browser and view source if you're unsure)

  with

  <managed-property>
      <property-name>input</property-name>
      <value>#{param.input}</value>
  </managed-property>
  

  and

  private String input; // +setter
  

  EL supports automatic conversion to primitive types and their wrappers as well, so you could for numbers also use private Long input; instead. The caveat is however that this would throw an ugly and unhandleable exception when the value is not parseable as a number.

• Or, gather them yourself by ExternalContext#getRequestParameterMap().

  public class Bean {
      private String input;
  
      public Bean() {
          Map<String, String> params = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().getExternalContext().getRequestParameterMap();
          input = params.get("input");
          // ...
      }
  }
  

  This allows for more fine-grained conversion/validation/errorhandling.