Introducing Jerry and Valerie

Or the JSF renderer interceptor and the (bean) validation extension.

A major new version is available under the Atbash umbrella: http://www.atbash.be/2018/02/26/a-renderer-interceptor-concept-for-java-serverfaces/

Introduction

The first opensource project where I ever posted a change to, was Apache MyFaces Extension Validation, ExtVal in short. It is a framework for having a validation platform with many great features.

But the last few years, I only used a few specific parts of the platform with some of my own extensions.

Since ExtVal was designed for JSF 1.x and later extended to JSF 2.x, I decided to recreate it.  CDI the cornerstone in every aspect of the version and geared towards JSF 2.x and Bean Validation.

But if you like, you can still create all the features from ExtVal in the new version.

Jerry

One of the features of ExtVal that I use a lot, is the JSF Renderer interceptor around which the complete platform is built. The idea is very simple, during registration of the renderers at startup, they are wrapped with a custom class.

This allows to have a before and after of all the important steps of a rendering; decode phase, encode begin, encode children, encode end and converted value.

This very simple concept has many possibilities. For example, you want to indicate every required input field with a special background colour.  These are the step that you need to do

1- Add Jerry to your maven project

<dependency>
   <groupId>be.rubus.web</groupId>
   <artifactId>jerry</artifactId>
   <version>${jerry.version}</version>
</dependency>

2- Define a ComponentInitializer, this is a specific renderer interceptor which can perform some actions in the before encode begin step.

@ApplicationScoped
public class RequiredInitializer implements ComponentInitializer {
   @Override
   public void configureComponent(FacesContext facesContext, UIComponent uiComponent, Map<String, Object> metaData) {
      InputText inputText = (InputText) uiComponent;

      if (inputText.isRequired()) {
         String style = inputText.getStyle();
         if (style == null) {
            style = "";
         }
         inputText.setStyle(style + " background-color: #B04A4A;");

      }
   }

   @Override
   public boolean isSupportedComponent(UIComponent uiComponent) {
      return uiComponent instanceof InputText;
   }
}

The above code adds the background colour to every PrimeFaces input text field.  This class is found using CDI mechanisms, and that is the reason why we have to annotate it with ApplicationScoped.  But it gives us also the possibility to inject any other CDI bean into this initialiser method.

Jerry is used in the Java EE declarative permission security framework Octopus to handle the security on the JSF component level.

Valerie

Another thing which I always find a bit annoying is that you should redefine the maximum length of a field at the JSF component level, although you have defined a Bean validation constraint on the java property.

For example, suppose you have a property for the name of a person

@Size(max = 50)
private String name;

When you have a JSF input field component pointing to to this property

<h:inputText value="#{personBean.name}"/>

then, the size restriction is checked during the validation phase. But why do you let the user input a longer then allowed value? So you have to use the size attribute on the h:inputText but it should go automatically, no.

That is where Valerie comes into the scene, another extraction from the ExtVal framework. 

side note; How the names are chosen. Jerry was chosen as it sounds phonetic like JRI (JSF Renderer Interceptor) So, I needed a female name to go alone with it and it should be related to validation.

So how can we have in the above example the size restriction from the bean validation property size on the screen?

The only thing you need to do is add the Valerie dependency to your project.  

<dependency>
   <groupId>be.rubus.web</groupId>
   <artifactId>valerie</artifactId>
   <version>${valerie.version}</version>
</dependency>

One renderer interceptor is responsible for retrieving and interpretation of the annotation information. A component initialiser then modifies the JSF component by specifying the size attribute from that info.

Conclusion

Jerry and Valerie are 2 small libraries extracted from the ExtVal framework.  They are centered around the JSF renderer interceptor and the extraction of bean validation information and gives you some handy features which makes your application easier to maintain.

The current version is 0.2, but since they have a firm solid history within ExtVal and are already used in a few projects, they are ready to use.  In the near future there will be some small features added and some more testing will be done before a first final version will be released.

They can be used in any Java EE 6 or Java EE 7 server (or servlet container if JSF, CDI and bean validation are present) and compiled with Java SE 6.

The basic documentation of the project can be found here and feedback, issues, feature request are welcome at the issue tracker on gitHub.

Maven artefacts are available in the C4J OpenSource Nexus 

<url>http://nexus-osc4j.rhcloud.com/content/groups/public/</url>

Have fun with it.