Facelet Support

Overview of requirements for alternative view handler support. Note: this document is provisional and subject to change.

NOTE: this page started as a place to discuss Facelet Support. This has since expanded to a discussion of generically supporting ViewHandlers such as those that support JSP as well as alternative view handlers such as those for Facelets.

• Mechanism for accumulating design-time meta-data for alternative view handler tags when not using JSP wrapper (see https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=192393#c14). Primarily this arises from the fact that there is no mandatory TLD-like descriptor for some popular alternative view handler such as facelets. This means that we need to find alternative ways to know, for example, what tag and attributes are available.

• Support for JSP-editor-like behaviour for tag lookup and EL region partitioniing in the HTML/XML source configuration. To support non-JSP JSF tags, we need to enhance and extend what the HTML SSE configuration provides for situations where we know an XHTML document will be consumed by an alternative view handler.

• WPE support for templating. This is a broad issue that affects both JSP views (jsp:include) as well as popular alternative view handlers such as Facelet views (ui:composition). We need to determine the common visual editing tasks involving templates and how to implement them.

• Identifying that an alternative view handler is in use. There are many facet-like activities here such as deciding how to update the web.xml file for servlet-mappings as well as whether an XHTML should be tooled for non-JSP view handlers or simply as a flat HTML file using the xml format. We may need to create an alternative view handler facet framework to support this.