Why does JSF save component tree state?

Question

There appears to be a difference between managed bean state and component tree state. You can control managed bean state by using annotations like @RequestScoped and @SessionScoped, but it seems you don't have a choice in whether the component tree state is saved or not (although you can choose whether it is saved on the server or client).

It seems like component tree state should only be needed for the duration of a single request as a temporary data structure to help process a request. It should be rebuilt from scratch for each request. With JSF 2.0 partial state saving makes the situation better because only form data is saved, but I don't understand why having even form data from the previous request is useful.

If your application uses only request scope managed beans then it especially doesn't make sense to save component tree state between requests. Even if your application has session scope managed beans I would assume that the managed beans would hold the state and the component tree still wouldn't need to have any state between requests.

Answer 1

Adding to the previous answer, ever since JSF 2.0 something called partial state saving is used by default.

The default view description language in JSF (Facelets) creates the whole component tree from the original Facelet after every request and initializes the components from their corresponding tag attributes. It then marks the state.

Every subsequent state change is then remembered as a delta change, and it's this state that is actually being saved. It might just well turn out that there simply are no such changes, and then the view state is empty (because of a bug, the state was never truly empty, but that has been recently fixed. See http://java.net/jira/browse/JAVASERVERFACES-2203 for details)

So the big question is, what's actually in this state then when it's non-empty?

As BalusC already remarked, this could hold dynamic changes to the component tree. Those changes can either be initiated from backing beans, or from within static components. A simple example of the kind of component that does this dynamic changing is a table component that creates child column components based on the actual number of columns in a data set.

Another important usage for the view state is remembering values that have been changed inside components, but have not been pushed into the model. This can be such things as flicking a switch in a switch component, moving a slider in a dial component etc.

One particular example is the viewParam component, which remembers the request parameter (query string parameter for GET or non-faces POST parameter) with which it was initialized. See this for some more info about that: http://arjan-tijms.omnifaces.org/2011/07/stateless-vs-stateful-jsf-view.html

There is also a strong relation with stateful components remembering UI state and conversion or validation that fails. In this case, the UI components will remember the values entered by the user, and will remember that there was a conversion/validation error.

Yet another usage for the state is optimization. Some components calculate values that they deem to be expensive to calculate and store these in the view state. For instance, UIInput components do this after the first post-back:

private boolean validateEmptyFields(FacesContext ctx) {

    if (validateEmptyFields == null) {
        ExternalContext extCtx = ctx.getExternalContext();
        String val = extCtx.getInitParameter(VALIDATE_EMPTY_FIELDS_PARAM_NAME);

        if (val == null) {
            val = (String) extCtx.getApplicationMap().get(VALIDATE_EMPTY_FIELDS_PARAM_NAME);
        }
        if (val == null || "auto".equals(val)) {
            validateEmptyFields = isBeansValidationAvailable(ctx);
        } else {
            validateEmptyFields = Boolean.valueOf(val);
        }
    }

    return validateEmptyFields;

}

After this validateEmptyFields is stored in the view state so it doesn't have to be calculated again upon the following form submits. An improvement would be if users can choose between re-calculating or storing (the well know time-space optimization).

The very concept of state is what has plagued web application development since its early conception. Everyone wants to have interactions that are essentially stateful, yet almost nobody wants to handle it or even think about it.

JSF has been trying to provide an answer here, but it's obviously not perfect and there's room for improvement. JSF's insistence on being able to restore view state (even empty view state) can be troublesome, although as was mentioned in another answer it does provide an implicit protection against CSRF. JSF 2.2 will get more explicit CSRF protection (see e.g. http://arjan-tijms.omnifaces.org/p/jsf-22.html#869), so maybe we will see some change here in the future.

Having an option to turn off state per component and having an easy hook to restore state incase the framework can't (as in ASP.NET) might also be helpful.