JSTL c:forEach causes @ViewScoped bean to invoke @PostConstruct on every request

Posted by Nitesh Panchal on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Nitesh Panchal
Published on 2010-05-16T02:23:21Z Indexed on 2010/05/16 2:50 UTC
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Hello, Again i see that the @PostConstruct is firing every time even though no binding attribute is used. See this code :-

<?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"
      xmlns:ui="http://java.sun.com/jsf/facelets"
      xmlns:c="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core">
    <h:head>
        <title>Facelet Title</title>
    </h:head>
    <h:body>
        <h:form>
            <c:forEach var="item" items="#{TestBean.listItems}">
                <h:outputText value="#{item}"/>
            </c:forEach>
            <h:commandButton value="Click" actionListener="#{TestBean.actionListener}"/>
        </h:form>
    </h:body>
</html>

And this is the simplest possible bean in JSF :-

package managedBeans;

import java.io.Serializable;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;
import javax.annotation.PostConstruct;
import javax.faces.bean.ManagedBean;
import javax.faces.bean.ViewScoped;

@ManagedBean(name="TestBean")
@ViewScoped
public class TestBean implements Serializable {

    private List<String> listItems;

    public List<String> getListItems() {
        return listItems;
    }

    public void setListItems(List<String> listItems) {
        this.listItems = listItems;
    }

    public TestBean() {

    }

    @PostConstruct
    public void init(){
        System.out.println("Post Construct fired!");
        listItems = new ArrayList<String>();
        listItems.add("Mango");
        listItems.add("Apple");
        listItems.add("Banana");
    }

    public void actionListener(){
        System.out.println("Action Listener fired!");
    }

}

Do you see any behaviour that should cause postconstruct callback to fire each time? I think JSF 2.0 is highly unstable. If it has to fire PostConstruct each and every time what purpose does @ViewScoped serve. Why not to use @RequestScoped only? I thought i have made some mistake in my application. But when i created this simplest possible in JSF, i still get this error. Am i not understanding the scopes of JSF? or are they not testing it properly? Further, if you remove c:forEach and replace it with ui:repeat, then it works fine.

Waiting for replies to confirm whether it is bug or it is intentional to stop the programmers from using jstl?

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