Readonly Value Binding in JSF for a hidden field

Many of the newbies of JSF will encounter situations where they find everything they wrote perfect but the JSF implementation throws strange errors. Here is one of the classic ones that you may step on.. .

Imagine you want to store some number(like some count) in a hidden field so that you can use it in your javascript to perform some task.

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you strongly know this should work fine, particularly when you are coming from a JSP/struts/struts2 background, but when this page gets submitted you will see errors from JSF saying that the count is not writable for int . This is because there is no setCount method on the someList bean, Although we are not writing anything to the hiddenField, we have to understand when ever a form gets submitted JSF tries to apply back the values into the component tree.

How to solve this ? Here is how they do it.

just add readonly="true" attribute to h:inputHidden, this will ensure JSF will not try to apply values through setCount method, but still renders the value to the page

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Hope this helps..

By the way ..this is my first post from my new MacBook Pro :-)