PrimeFaces Team is pleased to announce the 3.5.4 Elite release featuring 20 filed improvements. So far including the previous 3.5.x Elite releases there have been 95 improvements over 3.5 release. Most of these are defect fixes, performance improvements and security patches like xss. Some nice features from 4.0 is also ported to 3.5.x line as well.

Detailed changelog of 3.5.4 is;

New Features

• Tab Scrolling for TabView
• Add page ajax behavior to DataGrid

Defect Fixes

• FilterMap in FilterEvent is out of sync
• ImageCropper doesn’t seem to work in Portal environment
• p:focus “minSeverity” parameter is evaluated oppositely
• forElement attribute of Watermark component does force selector to be ID
• findClientIds does not correctly handle empty id’s
• CommandButton icon will also be rendered if icon is string empty
• AutoComplete with scrollheight not rendering on larger list
• Spinner fails with up-down error with arrow keys
• Spinner: up-down error with mouse wheel
• Missing Resource in Carousel
• p:inplace show callback not invoked on effect=slide|none
• p:inplace show doesn’t focus/select textareas
• Default sortBy not added to sortMeta on performing multi-sort for DataTable
• p:password breaks if quote marks are present in promptLabel
• DataTable is missing jQuery Plugins Dependency
• FileUpload Component z-index issue with overlays
• p:defaultCommand for p:splitButton
• Missing Resource in Log

Download

Binaries, Sources, Javadocs and Tag docs are available in PrimeFaces Elite Portal for Elite Subscribers as an official release bundle. PrimeFaces PRO Users can access the files from PRO Portal. Community users need to build/maintain their own PrimeFaces Builds by referencing the changes from public trunk aka 4.0-SNAPSHOT.

Roadmap

Starting with 3.5.4, we are aiming a shorther release cycle for Elite Subscribers. If you also would like to avoid maintaining your own branches by referencing code from trunk (4.0) manually or do not want to wait until public 4.0 is available then you may subscribe to PrimeFaces Elite for only 249$ per year (20$ per month).

Community powered PrimeFaces Extensions project has reached 0.7 release with various new features, improvements to existing features and defect fixes. Oleg Varaksin from PrimeFaces Extensions Team has posted a detailed release announcement.  Especially the TimeLine component looks awesome! Congratulations to Extensions Team and the PrimeFaces Community!

Extensions project is officially recognized by PrimeFaces Team and we work with our friends at Extensions Team closely to sort out any compatibility issues as Extensions require PrimeFaces to run on.

Always Bet on PrimeFaces and the Extensions!

PrimeFaces 4.0 codename SENTINEL will introduce dragdrop based manipulation support for Tree component.

Alpha Demo is available at PrimeFaces Showcase.

This feature is sponsored by a PrimeFaces PRO User and will also be available in an Elite 3.5.x release once the development is completed. A nice feature being worked on is dragdrop between trees to transfer one to another tree.

PrimeTek is pleased to announce the new 0.9.4 release for PrimeFaces Mobile. This version brings new mobile widgets, bug fixes and performance improvements. See full changelog for detailed information.

Dialog and Growl

Dialog and Growl components now have mobile renderers;

Optimized Resources

Prior to 0.9.4, various unnecessary resources such as javascript and css that belongs to PrimeFaces Web Widgets were included on a mobile page, with 0.9.4 this is optimized and page load time is reduced by loading only what is necessary for the page. jQuery Mobile is also updated to the latest version at time of release.

Maintenance

Various reported issues from the community is fixed and more will follow in upcoming releases.

Download and Documentation

0.9.4 is available at PrimeFaces downloads page, user’s guide is also update to cover new release.

Roadmap

PrimeFaces Mobile has been silent for some time due to our workload on other activities of PrimeFaces like PRO duties, Elite releases, Consulting and Training. To make sure Mobile is actively developed, long time PrimeFaces Mobile contributor Lazaro Nixon from Brazil has joined PrimeFaces Mobile Team, his main focus will be on mobile and already done so much for the 0.9.4 Release. So PrimeTek is doing more financial investments in PrimeFaces and its spin-off projects as you might have already realized from the activity in releases.

Next planned release is 0.9.5, more widgets will get mobile renderers in this release and we aim to bring lazy loading of views to improve performance significantly.

PrimeTek is glad to announce a new Elite Release for PrimeFaces. Starting with 3.5.3, we’ll be calling these exclusive point releases as Elite Versions instead of maintenance versions because Elite Releases also contains new features brought from the next major release 4.0 codenamed SENTINEL.

Here is the full changelog of what 3.5.3 brings, there are 32 filed improvements and one required special attention;

Major Defect in DataTable Sorting and Filtering

We have identified an important defect with datatable sorting in combination with filtering where applying a filter causes sorting stated to be lost leading to a visual sort indicator and an unsorted data. This issue has been filed at 5254 and fixed for 3.5.3 and 4.0.

New Features

• Autocomplete enhancement: cached list for dropdown
• No result found message for autocomplete
• Emptymessage attribute for treeTable component
• emptyMessage feature for DataList
• add focus attribute to p:dialog
• Dismissable and ShowCloseIcon features for OverlayPanel
• SelectOneMenu filter key events
• SelectOneMenu Filter Input should receive focus on show.

Defect Fixes

• Sorting state get lost in combination with filtering
• Problem with components that slide out from overlayPanel
• JavaScript does not updates ViewState after AJAX call in portlet environment
• MenuItem’s href=”javascript:void” causing problems in IE
• TieredMenu actions in overlay mode doesn’t work for IE8.
• SelectOneMenu widgetVar.focus() not working
• FocusRenderer dead code
• stepfactor on spinner in 3.5.2 does not work on integers
• Pass event object to the Tree’s onNodeClick handler
• Select All Checkbox not reseting on filtering for DataTable component
• “Select all checkbox” is not synced with row toggle select
• TabView – TabChangeEvent doesn’t render contents with dynamic data
• Wrong return type in FileUploadHandler
• Wrong CSS cursor in SelectOneMenu custom content items
• Checking a checkbox causes layout change
• SelectOneMenu filter shows wrong items when using up and down keys

Enhancements

• Hidden Container Support for Panel and Fieldset
• p:message option for no colon “:” in message
• Improve Multipart Request Exception Handling
• Tooltip for Attribute should not be required
• FeedReader size attribute should not be required
• Dialog should sync visible state with model
• MenuItems of SplitButton do not support Outcomes
• SelectOneMenu should select highlighted item on Tab Key

Download

Binaries, Sources, Javadocs and Tag docs are available in PrimeFaces Elite Portal for Elite Subscribers as an official release bundle. PrimeFaces PRO Users can access the files from PRO Portal. Community users need to build/maintain their own PrimeFaces Builds by referencing the changes from public trunk aka 4.0-SNAPSHOT.

Roadmap

Next Elite release in line is 3.5.4 due early May and the Next Major Release 4.0 aka Sentinel is under heavy development. Sentinel will bring various new features such as new Dialog Framework, Client Side Validation, new FileUpload, Tree DragDrop, new scrollbars, new components e.g. timeline component, improved quality on top of Elite and more are left as surprises. Sentinel is due late summer / early autumn of 2013.

PrimeTek is doing more investments in PrimeFaces and spin-off projects like PrimeFaces for ASP.NET, PrimeUI the javascript-css only UI widget framework and the PrimeFaces Mobile. Stay tuned for the upcoming news!

Always bet on Prime!

PrimeTek is pleased to annouce a brand new release of the Themes. This new 1.0.10 bundle brings the new Delta Theme and fixes to Twitter Bootstrap theme. See changelog for details.

Delta Theme

Download

Please visit PrimeFaces Theme Gallery for download and setup instructions. As with last release there is also an all-in-one bundle containing all themes.

Keep an eye on this blog for more PrimeFaces news, we’ll be releasing PrimeFaces 3.5.3 and PrimeFaces Mobile 0.9.4 this week!

MenuModel API is used to create PrimeFaces menu components like menu, tieredMenu, menubar programmatically. This is a very useful feature since in many cases application menus are not static and vary depending on user roles.

Current MenuModel implementation is however is not a real model unlike other PrimeFaces Models and can be considered as a workaround. It uses UIComponent instances directly and manipulates JSF Component Tree directly whereas a proper model should be composed of POJOs and the component should render the UI based on the POJOs. Current implementation also has a couple of limitations, most famous one is the “Cannot remove the same component twice” error because you can only use MenuModel with request scoped beans, otherwise it is likely to receive this error.

For 4.0, we have reimplemented MenuModel from scratch using best practices and it is significantly improved regarding usability, performance and memory usage. Highlights of the new MenuModel are;

• Lightweight
• Based on simple pojos
• Easy to extend
• Easy to persist in a data storage
• Can be used with any scope

Here is a sample implementation;

<p:menu model="#{menuBean.model}" />

public class MenuBean {

	private MenuModel model;

	public MenuBean() {
		model = new DefaultMenuModel();

		//First submenu
        DefaultSubMenu firstSubmenu = new DefaultSubMenu("Dynamic Submenu");

        DefaultMenuItem item = new DefaultMenuItem("External");
		item.setUrl("http://www.primefaces.org");
        item.setIcon("ui-icon-home");
		firstSubmenu.addElement(item);

        model.addElement(firstSubmenu);

		//Second submenu
		DefaultSubMenu secondSubmenu = new DefaultSubMenu("Dynamic Actions");

		item = new DefaultMenuItem("Save");
		item.setIcon("ui-icon-disk");
        item.setCommand("#{menuBean.save}");
        item.setUpdate("messages");
		secondSubmenu.addElement(item);

        item = new DefaultMenuItem("Delete");
        item.setIcon("ui-icon-close");
        item.setCommand("#{menuBean.delete}");
        item.setAjax(false);
        secondSubmenu.addElement(item);

        item = new DefaultMenuItem("Redirect");
        item.setIcon("ui-icon-search");
        item.setCommand("#{menuBean.redirect}");
		secondSubmenu.addElement(item);

        model.addElement(secondSubmenu);
	}

	public MenuModel getModel() {
		return model;
	}
}

There are two built-in implementations; DefaultMenuModel should be preferred if your model is static and do not change once built and DynamicMenuModel is for models that are likely to change during the flow.

Development time of the new model took 4 days and it is really worth it, we have already fixed-closed various reported issues on old MenuModel which can’t be fixed without a reimplementation. New MenuModel will be available in upcoming PrimeFaces 4.0.