posted 10 years ago
Actually, using a radio button to trigger an action like that is bad GUI technique. Radio buttons are designed for select-one/deselect-another displays. A standard button would be more appropriate here. Aside from purely user considerations, however, a radio button cannot trigger an action at all, unlike a commandButton or commandLink. The only way to get it to do so is to attach an AJAX event to it.
If you take the results of your database query, construct a DataModel object (ListDataModel or ArrayDataModel, preferably), and use that DataModel to wrap the query results, then your action method can tell which row was clicked by invoking the model object's rowData or rowIndex methods.
To make the model work properly, you must define it in a backing bean whose scope is NOT request scope and you have to set the dataTable's value= attribute to reference a property that retrieves that DataModel object (it's read-only, so no need for a "set" method, only "get").
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.