Differences between action and actionListener

user_425186 0
Viewed 282252

What is the difference between action and actionListener, and when should I use action versus actionListener?

actionlistener jsf-2 action jsf
4 Answers

As BalusC indicated, the actionListener by default swallows exceptions, but in JSF 2.0 there is a little more to this. Namely, it doesn't just swallows and logs, but actually publishes the exception.

This happens through a call like this:

context.getApplication().publishEvent(context, ExceptionQueuedEvent.class,                                                          
    new ExceptionQueuedEventContext(context, exception, source, phaseId)
);

The default listener for this event is the ExceptionHandler which for Mojarra is set to com.sun.faces.context.ExceptionHandlerImpl. This implementation will basically rethrow any exception, except when it concerns an AbortProcessingException, which is logged. ActionListeners wrap the exception that is thrown by the client code in such an AbortProcessingException which explains why these are always logged.

This ExceptionHandler can be replaced however in faces-config.xml with a custom implementation:

<exception-handlerfactory>
   com.foo.myExceptionHandler
</exception-handlerfactory>

Instead of listening globally, a single bean can also listen to these events. The following is a proof of concept of this:

@ManagedBean
@RequestScoped
public class MyBean {

    public void actionMethod(ActionEvent event) {

        FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().getApplication().subscribeToEvent(ExceptionQueuedEvent.class, new SystemEventListener() {

        @Override
        public void processEvent(SystemEvent event) throws AbortProcessingException {
            ExceptionQueuedEventContext content = (ExceptionQueuedEventContext)event.getSource();
            throw new RuntimeException(content.getException());
        }

        @Override
        public boolean isListenerForSource(Object source) {
            return true;
        }
        });

        throw new RuntimeException("test");
    }

}

(note, this is not how one should normally code listeners, this is only for demonstration purposes!)

Calling this from a Facelet like this:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
    xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"
    xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core">
    <h:body>
        <h:form>
            <h:commandButton value="test" actionListener="#{myBean.actionMethod}"/>
        </h:form>
    </h:body>
</html>

Will result in an error page being displayed.

user_4727920

TL;DR:

The ActionListeners (there can be multiple) execute in the order they were registered BEFORE the action

Long Answer:

A business action typically invokes an EJB service and if necessary also sets the final result and/or navigates to a different view if that is not what you are doing an actionListener is more appropriate i.e. for when the user interacts with the components, such as h:commandButton or h:link they can be handled by passing the name of the managed bean method in actionListener attribute of a UI Component or to implement an ActionListener interface and pass the implementation class name to actionListener attribute of a UI Component.

user_54765160
Related