The Java EE 5 Tutorial, Third Edition: For Sun Java System Application Server Platform

12. Creating Custom UI Components JavaServer Faces technology offers a basic set of standard, reusable UI components that enable page authors and application developers to quickly and easily construct UIs for web applications. But often an a...

Determining Whether You Need a Custom Component or Renderer The JavaServer Faces implementation supports a rich set of components and associated renderers, which are enough for most simple applications. This section helps you decide whether you ne...

Understanding the Image Map Example Duke's Bookstore includes a custom image map component on the chooselocale.jsp page. This image map displays a map of the world. When the user clicks one of a particular set of regions in the map, the applicatio...

Steps for Creating a Custom Component Before we describe how the image map works, let's summarize the basic steps for creating custom components. You can apply the following steps while developing your own custom component. 1. Cre...

Creating Custom Component Classes As explained in When to Use a Custom Component (page 426), a component class defines the state and behavior of a UI component. The state information includes the component's type, identifier, and local value. Th...

Delegating Rendering to a Renderer Both MapComponent and AreaComponent delegate all of their rendering to a separate renderer. The section Performing Encoding (page 440) explains how MapRenderer performs the encoding for MapComponent. This section...

Handling Events for Custom Components As explained in Implementing an Event Listener (page 408), events are automatically queued on standard components that fire events. A custom component, on the other hand, must manually queue events from its de...

Creating the Component Tag Handler Now that you've created your component and renderer classes, you're ready to define how a tag handler processes the tag representing the component and renderer combination. If you've created your own JSP custom t...

Defining the Custom Component Tag in a Tag Library Descriptor To define a tag, you declare it in a TLD. The web container uses the TLD to validate the tag. The set of tags that are part of the HTML render kit are defined in the html_basic TLD. Th...