commandButton/commandLink/ajax action/listener met

Question

Sometimes, when using <h:commandLink>, <h:commandButton> or <f:ajax>, the action, actionListener or listener method associated with the tag are simply not being invoked. Or, the bean properties are not updated with submitted UIInput values.

What are the possible causes and solutions for this?

Answer 1

I would mention one more thing that concerns Primefaces's p:commandButton!

When you use a p:commandButton for the action that needs to be done on the server, you can not use type="button" because that is for Push buttons which are used to execute custom javascript without causing an ajax/non-ajax request to the server.

For this purpose, you can dispense the type attribute (default value is "submit") or you can explicitly use type="submit".

Hope this will help someone!

Answer 2

One more possibility: if the symptom is that the first invocation works, but subsequent ones do not, you may be using PrimeFaces 3.x with JSF 2.2, as detailed here: No ViewState is sent.

Answer 3

Got stuck with this issue myself and found one more cause for this problem. If you don't have setter methods in your backing bean for the properties used in your *.xhtml , then the action is simply not invoked.

Answer 4

While my answer isn't 100% applicable, but most search engines find this as the first hit, I decided to post it nontheless:

If you're using PrimeFaces (or some similar API) p:commandButton or p:commandLink, chances are that you have forgotten to explicitly add process="@this" to your command components.

As the PrimeFaces User's Guide states in section 3.18, the defaults for process and update are both @form, which pretty much opposes the defaults you might expect from plain JSF f:ajax or RichFaces, which are execute="@this" and render="@none" respectively.

Just took me a looong time to find out. (... and I think it's rather unclever to use defaults that are different from JSF!)

Answer 5

<ui:composition>  
  <h:form id="form1">
    <p:dialog id="dialog1">
      <p:commandButton value="Save" action="#{bean.method1}" /> <!--Working-->
    </p:dialog>
  </h:form>

  <h:form id="form2">
    <p:dialog id="dialog2">
      <p:commandButton value="Save" action="#{bean.method2}" /> <!--Not Working-->
    </p:dialog>
  </h:form>
</ui:composition>

To solve;

<ui:composition>  
  <h:form id="form1">
    <p:dialog id="dialog1">
      <p:commandButton value="Save" action="#{bean.method1}" />   <!-- Working  -->
    </p:dialog>

    <p:dialog id="dialog2">
      <p:commandButton value="Save" action="#{bean.method2}" />   <!--Working  -->
    </p:dialog>
  </h:form>
  <h:form id="form2">
    <!-- ..........  -->
  </h:form>
</ui:composition>

Answer 6

I recently ran into a problem with a UICommand not invoking in a JSF 1.2 application using IBM Extended Faces Components.

I had a command button on a row of a datatable (the extended version, so <hx:datatable>) and the UICommand would not fire from certain rows from the table (the rows that would not fire were the rows greater than the default row display size).

I had a drop-down component for selecting number of rows to display. The value backing this field was in RequestScope. The data backing the table itself was in a sort of ViewScope (in reality, temporarily in SessionScope).

If the row display was increased via the control which value was also bound to the datatable's rows attribute, none of the rows displayed as a result of this change could fire the UICommand when clicked.

Placing this attribute in the same scope as the table data itself fixed the problem.

I think this is alluded to in BalusC #4 above, but not only did the table value need to be View or Session scoped but also the attribute controlling the number of rows to display on that table.