The tooling around the JavaServer Faces technology, such as the Faces components in the Palette view, is considered to be Beta level function. The documentation that refers to this function is also supported at the Beta level.
Because the JavaServer Faces features are in Beta state, they should not be used for production applications. IBM does not assure forward migration, compatibility, or support of JavaServer Page files that use these JavaServer Faces features.
When the user creates a page template (based on a Faces page) that contains multiple content areas the user must ensure that a Faces form tag surrounds both content areas. This can be done in one of two ways. The first and most straight forward way would be to Drag and drop a command button from the palette onto each of the content areas on the page, and deleting them again once all the buttons are dropped. This will force the form tag to be re-parented until it encapsulates all content areas. The alternative is to un-hide the form component in the Faces Components palette drawer and drag and drop it onto the template and drag and drop the content areas onto the form component.
Users may notice issues when dragging and dropping the File Upload component from the palette onto a page that is generated from a page template that already contains the faces form tag. The drop action needs to be able to edit the form's attributes in order to complete the drop. There are two possible workarounds:
a) Change the form tag in the page template so it has an enctype attribute. Set the attribute to "multipart/form-data" e.g.: <h:form formName="form1" id="form1" enctype="multipart/form-data"></h:form>
b) Place the form tag in an editable area of the template. This can be done by dropping a content area onto the page and then unhiding the palette form item and dropping it on the content area.
Currently the cut, copy, and paste features of Page Designer will only produce an exact copy of a JSP tag and insert it at the current cursor location. This is not always useful when dealing with Faces components because often the new tag will be pasted inside an existing control even if this is not a valid location. There are constraints about tag nestings and unique IDs that aren't appropriately handled today by basic cut and paste (either Ctrl-x/Ctrl-c/Ctrl-v or menu actions). To avoid errors when manipulating controls in the Design pane, instead use the mouse to select and drag a control to move its position. Holding down the Ctrl key during drag can also be used to copy a Faces control and will produce a new tag with a unique ID at the drop location.
When dragging Faces components from the palette onto a regular JSP page in a web project you may be prompted to add new project resources. Do not respond "Yes" to this prompt, but instead cancel the drop and manually add the project feature for Faces components (available in the project's Properties configuration). After the project feature is added repeat the palette drop.
When Quick Edit View is open and a Faces component is selected in Page Designer and the Attribute view is used to rename the component's id, it will not completely update all references to that id in the JSP's corresponding Java source file. It will rename all occurances of that id located anywhere in the Java source file, except in the method that Quick Edit View is currently editing. The workaround is to close Quick Edit View before renaming a Faces component via the attributes view. An alternative workaround is to manually rename the component id referenced in that method.
When using page templates there may be some cases when dropping or moving Faces tags results in incorrect tag placement. For the page to work at runtime the "use_faces" tag must surround any other Faces tags on the page. If you discover it does not you can work around this by cutting and pasting "use_faces" to a better location that surrounds all of the other Faces tags.
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