在WebSphere 9上的JSF 2.2中管理bean

Question

Posting this problem / answer as I did not find any other question that was very similar. Lots of related ones but not same scenario.

Was upgrading JSF 2.1 to JSF 2.2 (Mojarra) application for h:fileUpload support. Application runs on WebSphere 9, and after upgrade was encountering problems with dependency injection using JSF Beans.

Reading further I realize that JSF @ManagedBean is to be deprecated and should be migrated to CDI @Named but our application had 627 references to the FacesContext and migrating to a CDI bean would mean updating all those places to either produce a FacesContext when needed, or upgrade JSF to 2.3 and inject the FacesContext where it is needed. This means staying on JSF 2.2 for now.

Here is the bean :

package com.company.customersearch;

import javax.faces.application.FacesMessage;
import javax.faces.bean.ManagedBean;
import javax.faces.bean.ManagedProperty;
import javax.faces.bean.ViewScoped;
import javax.faces.context.FacesContext;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpSession;

@ManagedBean(name = "customerSearchManager")
@ViewScoped
public class customerSearchManager extends PortletManager{

    private static final long serialVersionUID = -9050481751306478727L;
    private Long customerId;
    private SessionData sessionData;

    @ManagedProperty(value = "#{customerSearchService}")
    private CustomerSearchService service;

    public CustomerSearchManager(){
        this.sessionData = new SessionData((HttpSession) FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().getExternalContext().getSession(false));
        if (sessionData.hasSelectedCustomer())
            this.customerId = sessionData.getData().getCustomerId();
    }   

...
}

Running on WebSphere 9 was producing a NullPointerException

Error Rendering View[/pages/customer-search.xhtml]
                                 java.lang.NullPointerException
    at com.sun.faces.application.view.ViewScopedCDIEventFireHelperImpl.fireInitializedEvent(ViewScopedCDIEventFireHelperImpl.java:60)
    at com.sun.faces.application.view.ViewScopeContextManager.fireInitializedEvent(ViewScopeContextManager.java:394)
    at com.sun.faces.application.view.ViewScopeManager.processPostConstructViewMap(ViewScopeManager.java:312)
    at com.sun.faces.application.view.ViewScopeManager.processEvent(ViewScopeManager.java:244)
    at com.sun.faces.application.view.ViewScopeEventListener.processEvent(ViewScopeEventListener.java:68)

The NPE is coming out of a CDI related class! Why would we get an NPE inside of ViewScopedCDIEventFireHelperImpl.java when intentionally not using CDI??

Answer 1

I don't know if other enterprise containers are this way, but for WebSphere, CDI is enabled by default and is apparently overriding or trying to replace the JSF beans at runtime (??). Wish I understood a bit more on what is happening in the container in this scenario.

Found the following on the IBM site regarding CDI settings:

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21983564

There you can see that there are 2 properties to set on your JVM if you are truly intending to use JSF @ManagedBean s and avoid conflicts with CDI all together. Worked for me.

Set :

com.ibm.ws.cdi.enableCDI = false
com.ibm.ws.cdi.enableImplicitBeanArchives  = false

Hope it helps someone.