What is the correct way to deal with JSF 2.0 exceptions for AJAXified components?

Question

I have set up web.xml so that anything that's java.lang.Throwable (i.e. any uncaught exceptions or errors) will forward to an error page. However, for AJAXified components, exceptions dont get routed to the error page via this mechanism.

The test case I have is a simple CommandButton tied to an action method that always throws a RuntimeException. It seems like the best practice would be to have the action method catch the exception and add a FacesMessage of type error severity. Is this what people do? Is there a way to configure JSF so that if an AJAXified component's backing bean method throws an exception that the error page can be shown?

Answer 1

You need to implement a custom ExceptionHandler for this which does basically the following when an exception occurs in an ajax request:

String errorPageLocation = "/WEB-INF/errorpages/500.xhtml";
context.setViewRoot(context.getApplication().getViewHandler().createView(context, errorPageLocation));
context.getPartialViewContext().setRenderAll(true);
context.renderResponse();

This is not exactly trivial if you want to take web.xml error pages into account. You'd need to parse the entire web.xml for this to find the error page locations. Also, when the exception occurred during render response, then you'd basically need to rebuild the whole view yourself. The OmniFaces component library has exactly such an exception handler, the FullAjaxExceptionHandler. You can find the full source code here and the showcase example here.

See also:

• using ExternalContext.dispatch in JSF error handler causes corrupt page rendering
• Session timeout and ViewExpiredException handling on JSF/PrimeFaces ajax request