How to hightlight a field in JSF when validation fails

Highlighting an input field that failed validation (or conversation) is a common UI practice today. This sort of functionality is not available in JSF (nor RichFaces) out of the box (Seam does have it). I got an email from RichFaces 4 workshop attendee from CONFESS_2011 conference asking how to do it and I thought it’s a good idea to make it blog post. It turns out, implementing such functionality is pretty simple. All we need to do is check if a particular field (component) is valid and then render or not render a style for the input field.

Let’s start with the Java bean:

@ManagedBean
@RequestScoped
public class Bean implements Serializable {

   private String text; // getter and setter

   public boolean isInputValid (){
      FacesContext context = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance();
      UIInput input = (UIInput)context.getViewRoot().findComponent(":form:input");
      return input.isValid();
   }
}

Inside isInputValid, we are searching for a particular component and checking whether it’s valid or not.

JSF page:

.inputInvalid {
   border: 2px solid red;
}



   
      
         
	 
	    
		
	    
	    
	 
      
   

Everything important happens here:

styleClass="#{bean.inputValid?'':'inputInvalid'}"

If the component is invalid (validation has failed), then we will render inputInvalid CSS class. Otherwise, nothing is rendered.

This is the result when running the page (before invoking validation):

After validation:

As you can see the solution is pretty simple.