JSF 2 outputText example

In JSF 2.0 web application, “h:outputText” tag is the most common used tag to display plain text, and it doesn’t generate any extra HTML elements. See example…

1. Managed Bean

A managed bean, provide some text for demonstration.

import javax.faces.bean.ManagedBean;
import javax.faces.bean.SessionScoped;
 
@ManagedBean(name="user")
@SessionScoped
public class UserBean{
 
	public String text = "This is Text!";
	public String htmlInput = "<input type='text' size='20' />";
 
	//getter and setter methods...
}

2. View Page

Page with few “h:outputText” tags example.

JSF…

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" 
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"   
      xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html">
 
    <h:body>
    	<h1>JSF 2.0 h:outputText Example</h1>
    	<ol>
    	   <li>#{user.text}</li>
 
 	   <li><h:outputText value="#{user.text}" /></li>
 
	   <li><h:outputText value="#{user.text}" styleClass="abc" /></li>
 
	   <li><h:outputText value="#{user.htmlInput}" /></li>
 
	   <li><h:outputText value="#{user.htmlInput}" escape="false" /></li>
	 </ol>
    </h:body>
</html>

Generate following HTML code…

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" 
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> 
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
   <body> 
    	<h1>JSF 2.0 h:outputText Example</h1> 
    	<ol> 
    	   <li>This is Text!</li> 
 
           <li>This is Text!</li> 
 
	   <li><span class="abc">This is Text!</span></li> 
 
	   <li>&lt;input type='text' size='20' /&gt;</li> 
 
	   <li><input type='text' size='20' /></li> 
	</ol>
   </body> 
</html>

For case 1 and 2
In JSF 2.0, you don’t really need to use “h:outputText” tag, since you can achieve the same thing with direct value expression “#{user.text}”.
For case 3
If any of “styleClass”, “style”, “dir” or “lang” attributes are present, render the text and wrap it with “span” element.
For case 4 and 5
The “escape” attribute in “h:outputText” tag, is used to convert sensitive HTML and XML markup to the corresponds valid HTML character.
For example,
1. < convert to <
2. > convert to >
3. & convert to &
By default, “escape” attribute is set to true.