How to deactivate a JSF tag (Primefaces)

Question

I use Primefaces 5.x (on myFaces 2.2.x) for my UI and I want to disable / deactivate some JSF tags like to avoid mistakes.

Is there a blacklist or whitelist I can use?

Answer 1

There's no such thing in standard JSF/PrimeFaces API.

Quick'n'dirty workaround would be overriding the component registration in webapp's faces-config.xml whereby you set the component class to a non-UIComponent class (it will ultimately throw ClassCastException on usage), or to a custom UIComponent which throws e.g. IllegalArgumentException in its constructor.

E.g. if you'd like to avoid usage of <p:selectOneMenu> component which has a component type of org.primefaces.component.SelectOneMenu:

<component>
    <component-type>org.primefaces.component.SelectOneMenu</component-type>
    <component-class>java.lang.Object</component-class>
</component>

An alternative would be to manually visit the component tree after it's being built and check every single component class against a white/black list in a Set<Class<UIComponent>>.

A more clean alternative would be to override Application#createComponent() to check the component type against a white/black list.

Yet another alternative would be to edit the PrimeFaces taglib/config XML to remove the undesired components and rebuild the JAR.