How does the 'binding' attribute work in JSF? When and how should it be used?

Question

There are lot of materials out there differentiating value attribute and binding attribute in JSF.

I'm interested in how both approaches differ from each other. Given:

public class User {
    private String name;
    private UICommand link;

    // Getters and setters omitted.
}

<h:form>
    <h:commandLink binding="#{user.link}" value="#{user.name}" />
</h:form>

It is pretty straight forward what happens when a value attribute is specified. The getter runs to return the name property value of the User bean. The value is printed to HTML output.

But I couldn't understand how binding works. How does the generated HTML maintain a binding with the link property of the User bean?

Below is the relevant part of the generated output after manual beautification and commenting (note that the id j_id_jsp_1847466274_1 was auto-generated and that there are two hidden input widgets). I'm using Sun's JSF RI, version 1.2.

<form action="/TestJSF/main.jsf" enctype="application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
    id="j_id_jsp_1847466274_1" method="post"  name="j_id_jsp_1847466274_1">
    <input name="j_id_jsp_1847466274_1" type="hidden" value="j_id_jsp_1847466274_1">
    <a href="#" onclick="...">Name</a>
    <input autocomplete="off" id="javax.faces.ViewState" name="javax.faces.ViewState"
        type="hidden" value="-908991273579182886:-7278326187282654551">
</form>

Where is the binding stored here?

Answer 1

How does it work?

When a JSF view (Facelets/JSP file) get built/restored, a JSF component tree will be produced. At that moment, the view build time, all binding attributes are evaluated (along with id attribtues and taghandlers like JSTL). When the JSF component needs to be created before being added to the component tree, JSF will check if the binding attribute returns a precreated component (i.e. non-null) and if so, then use it. If it's not precreated, then JSF will autocreate the component "the usual way" and invoke the setter behind binding attribute with the autocreated component instance as argument.

In effects, it binds a reference of the component instance in the component tree to a scoped variable. This information is in no way visible in the generated HTML representation of the component itself. This information is in no means relevant to the generated HTML output anyway. When the form is submitted and the view is restored, the JSF component tree is just rebuilt from scratch and all binding attributes will just be re-evaluated like described in above paragraph. After the component tree is recreated, JSF will restore the JSF view state into the component tree.

Component instances are request scoped!

Important to know and understand is that the concrete component instances are effectively request scoped. They're newly created on every request and their properties are filled with values from JSF view state during restore view phase. So, if you bind the component to a property of a backing bean, then the backing bean should absolutely not be in a broader scope than the request scope. See also JSF 2.0 specitication chapter 3.1.5:

3.1.5 Component Bindings

...

Component bindings are often used in conjunction with JavaBeans that are dynamically instantiated via the Managed Bean Creation facility (see Section 5.8.1 “VariableResolver and the Default VariableResolver”). It is strongly recommend that application developers place managed beans that are pointed at by component binding expressions in “request” scope. This is because placing it in session or application scope would require thread-safety, since UIComponent instances depends on running inside of a single thread. There are also potentially negative impacts on memory management when placing a component binding in “session” scope.

Otherwise, component instances are shared among multiple requests, possibly resulting in "duplicate component ID" errors and "weird" behaviors because validators, converters and listeners declared in the view are re-attached to the existing component instance from previous request(s). The symptoms are clear: they are executed multiple times, one time more with each request within the same scope as the component is been bound to.

And, under heavy load (i.e. when multiple different HTTP requests (threads) access and manipulate the very same component instance at the same time), you may face sooner or later an application crash with e.g. Stuck thread at UIComponent.popComponentFromEL, or Java Threads at 100% CPU utilization using richfaces UIDataAdaptorBase and its internal HashMap, or even some "strange" IndexOutOfBoundsException or ConcurrentModificationException coming straight from JSF implementation source code while JSF is busy saving or restoring the view state (i.e. the stack trace indicates saveState() or restoreState() methods and like).

Using binding on a bean property is bad practice

Regardless, using binding this way, binding a whole component instance to a bean property, even on a request scoped bean, is in JSF 2.x a rather rare use case and generally not the best practice. It indicates a design smell. You normally declare components in the view side and bind their runtime attributes like value, and perhaps others like styleClass, disabled, rendered, etc, to normal bean properties. Then, you just manipulate exactly that bean property you want instead of grabbing the whole component and calling the setter method associated with the attribute.

In cases when a component needs to be "dynamically built" based on a static model, better is to use view build time tags like JSTL, if necessary in a tag file, instead of createComponent(), new SomeComponent(), getChildren().add() and what not. See also How to refactor snippet of old JSP to some JSF equivalent?

Or, if a component needs to be "dynamically rendered" based on a dynamic model, then just use an iterator component (<ui:repeat>, <h:dataTable>, etc). See also How to dynamically add JSF components.

Composite components is a completely different story. It's completely legit to bind components inside a <cc:implementation> to the backing component (i.e. the component identified by <cc:interface componentType>. See also a.o. Split java.util.Date over two h:inputText fields representing hour and minute with f:convertDateTime and How to implement a dynamic list with a JSF 2.0 Composite Component?

Only use binding in local scope

However, sometimes you'd like to know about the state of a different component from inside a particular component, more than often in use cases related to action/value dependent validation. For that, the binding attribute can be used, but not in combination with a bean property. You can just specify an in the local EL scope unique variable name in the binding attribute like so binding="#{foo}" and the component is during render response elsewhere in the same view directly as UIComponent reference available by #{foo}. Here are several related questions where such a solution is been used in the answer:

• Validate input as required only if certain command button is pressed
• How to render a component only if another component is not rendered?
• JSF 2 dataTable row index without dataModel
• Primefaces dependent selectOneMenu and required="true"
• Validate a group of fields as required when at least one of them is filled
• How to change css class for the inputfield and label when validation fails?
• Getting JSF-defined component with Javascript

• Use an EL expression to pass a component ID to a composite component in JSF

  (and that's only from the last month...)

See also:

• How to use component binding in JSF right ? (request-scoped component in session scoped bean)
• View scope: java.io.NotSerializableException: javax.faces.component.html.HtmlInputText
• Binding attribute causes duplicate component ID found in the view