The Corporate Code

Since the application is rather huge, and exception handling isn’t something that has been taken into account when writing the drafts for JSF, it took me some time to find a decent way to implement exception handling. I came up with two possible solutions, but after further testing it turned out that only one of them actually worked. Sadly it was the one that I felt, was the worst scenario.

First I tried to delegate the Faces servlet and tried to catch any exceptions there. that would have been a nice solution, since all exception handling would have been centralized and I wouldn’t have to have to much boiler plate code inside my application. But, as it turned out, this solution didn’t work :( After carefully testing the mock-up I had to come to the conclusion that delegating a Faces servlet is not a good way to go, certainly not a good way if your using icefaces.

The second solution was rather nasty but, i went on with it anyway since I couldn’t find any better solution after searching the net. I let every exception get back to the event methods and catch it there. Once I had the exception there, I was able to pass it to an exception handler class, which would take care of the logging and displaying a nice pop up with some info for the user.

If you ever think of building a corporate application using JSF, don’t ! :) In my opinion it lacks some basic functionality and basically it isn’t ready for usage in real world applications yet. If you really want JSF then don’t use it as a stand-alone framework, I think it would be better to use it in combination with Spring or Struts.