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jsfjsf-2

Render JSF component based on user role

How do I render JSF components based on a logged in user's role? I know the external context exposes the principals, but how should I do the rendering properly in JSF? In JSP it would be something like

<% isUserInRole(Roles.ADMIN) { %>
<button>Edit!</button>
<% } %>

How do I write this in JSF the best possible way? My best guess is the rendered attribute tied to a backing bean's method that returns a boolean, but that would introduce an irrelevant backing bean if I have to render some navigation items only for admins...

Glassfish V3.1, JSF 2.x

Solution

  • If your web.xml is declared as Servlet 3.0 (which implicitly relates to JSP/EL 2.2)

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app 
    xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" 
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_3_0.xsd" 
    version="3.0">

    then you can take benefit of being able to invoke methods with arguments in EL like as ExternalContext#isUserInRole():

    rendered="#{facesContext.externalContext.isUserInRole('ADMIN')}"

    Note that this requires a Servlet 3.0 capable container, but since you're using Glassfish 3 (which supports Servlet 3.0), it should work without any issues.

    Also note that if you're using Facelets instead of JSP, then you've the HttpServletRequest available as #{request} in EL, allowing you the following shorter expression:

    rendered="#{request.isUserInRole('ADMIN')}"