JSF Input Tags

The JSF HTML input tags can be classified as shown below. These tags must be in a <form> tag. Otherwise their input will not be sent when a request is made.

Text Input

h:inputText
h:inputTextarea
h:inputSecret

Boolean Input

h:selectBooleanCheckbox

Selection

h:selectOneListbox
h:selectOneRadio
h:selectOneMenu

h:selectManyCheckbox
h:selectManyListbox
h:selectManyMenu

All of the examples for these tags share a common structure.

The demonstration examples are all in one application. They have the same structure:

Java classes (Source Packages/tag-name/):
- Data.java - a request scoped bean for transferring input data
JSF pages (Web Pages/tag-name/):
- index.xhtml - a screen to display the input widget
- result.xhtml - a screen to display the user input or selection
Configuration files (Web Pages/WEB-INF/:
- web.xml - the default configuration file created by NetBeans

The three text input tags have distinct purposes as shown in the table below:

Tag	Purpose
h:inputText	short text, numbers, dates, currency
h:inputTextarea	long text
h:inputSecret	passwords

The selection tags come in two varieties:

selectOneWidget-type are for choosing a single value from a set of choices.
selectManyWidget-type are for choosing a set of values from a set of choices.

There are three widget type options for both of these varieties. The choice of the widget type is determined by ease of use and screen space considerations.

Tag	Ease of Use	Screen Space
h:selectOneListbox	easiest	less compact
h:selectOneRadio	easiest	least compact
h:selectOneMenu	easy	most compact

Tag	Ease of Use	Screen Space
h:selectManyCheckbox	easiest	least compact
h:selectManyListbox	easy	less compact
h:selectManyMenu	difficult	most compact