selectOneMenu update from backing bean

[clara irma]

Hi All,

I'm very new in JSF development, so I'm hoping to get some pointers from you guys

I am currently developing a simple web application that displays a set of JSF components, some of them are custom JSF.

One of the components is a drop down list (I am using selectOneMenu component). I bind the value and the selectItems to my backing bean, as shown in the code below:

<h:selectOneMenu id="menu" title="select area" value="#{myBean.value}">
<f:selectItems id="items" binding="#{myBean.areaItems}" />
</h:selectOneMenu>  

And in my backing bean, I have the following:
- String value;
- UISelectItems areaItems;
- and a method that fills up the content of the areaItems

public void fillAreaItems()
{
areaItems = new UISelectItems();
		
	ArrayList areaNames = getAreaNames();
		
	SelectItem[] i = new SelectItem[areaNames.size()];
	i = areaNames.toArray(i);
		
	areaItems.setValue(i);
		
}

The code works fine for the initial display. However, there is a custom JSF component on the page that displays an image and listens to user mouse event.
Upon mouse click, the listener (which is the backing bean) will be notified and the image being displayed will be updated.
Subsequently, the list of items displayed by the selectOneMenu needs to be updated as well (correspond to the new image).

How do I implement the refresh of selectItems in selectOneMenu upon an event received by another JSF component (and handled by the backing bean)?
Currently, upon mouse click, the image gets updated, but not the drop down menu, even though the areaItems object in the bean has been updated.

Any advise or pointers will be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

[Tim Holloway]

Probably the easiest way is to use AJAX-enabled JSF components like those provided by JBoss RichFaces. The RichFaces controls support an attribute named "reRender" that tells what parts of the page should be updated.

[clara irma]

Hi Tim,

Thanks for the suggestion! I will be looking into ajax4jsf for this.