Skip to main content

Attribute 'for' of label component with id xxxx is not defined


I got the warning in the log file when I have used the tag <h:outputLabel> without attribute "for" in xhtml file. It was really polluting my server log files.

The logged information actually makes sense anyway! We could find an answer as the following:

"Having h:outputLabel without a "for" attribute is meaningless. If you are not attaching the label, you should be using h:outputText instead of h:outputLabel."

However, these solutions are not possible just for my situation. Instead of using h:outputText for only displaying text, my team has used h:outputLabel too many places. We were nearly in our release time (next day) so it is quite risky and takes much efforts if we try to correct it. Because the style (with CSS) is already done with h:ouputLabel. The alternative by adding attribute "for" the existing h:outputLabel is not reasonable either. I really need to find another solution.

Fortunately, I came across a way if I change to use p:outputLabel, the warning won't be logged! What?

I was just curious to know why; so then I decided to delve into the implementation of outputLabel of both Primefaces and Myfaces source code (at grepcode.com). I found the reason is:

In Myfaces (1.2.2), we can easily to find the line of code below in method "encodeBegin" in class "HtmlLabelRenderer". It is executed whether the attribute "for" is null.

log.warn("Attribute 'for' of label component with id " 
+ uiComponent.getClientId(facesContext)+" is not defined");

However, Primefaces (5.2) does not. In class "OutputLabelRenderer", it uses the default implementation of method "encodeBegin" from superclass without logging. Ahh! The method "encodeBegin" is just a hook!

Okay! The reason is clear. I saw that the only difference of HTML rendering between h:outputLabel and p:outputLabel is as below:

1. <h:ouputLabel> will be rendered  to become <label>
2. <p:outputLabel> will be rendered to become <label class="ui-outputlabel">

It should be an acceptable approach to fix the issue in my case. I just do a little bit more with style and I can achieve my goal without spending much efforts for testing whole the application again. Yeah!

Something like this:

1. XHTML

<h:panelGroup layout="block" styleClass="child-add-ons-container">

    <ul>

        <li>

            <h:panelGroup layout="block" styleClass="type-of-check">

                <p:outputLabel value="bonity"></p:outputLabel>

            </h:panelGroup>

        <li>

        ....

    <ul>

</h:panelGroup>

2. CSS: just make sure the style of p:outputLabel is the same with current style of h:outputLabel, for example:
.add-ons-compliance-check .type-of-check label.ui-outputlabel {

    font-style: normal; /*style of tag label in our app*/

    color: inherit;  /*style of tag label in our app*/

    font: inherit;  /*style of tag label in our app*/

}

References
[1]. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12744264/attribute-for-of-label-error
[2]. http://docs.oracle.com/javaee/5/javaserverfaces/1.2/docs/tlddocs/h/outputLabel.html
[3]. http://grokbase.com/t/myfaces/users/143vdzqp11/how-to-disable-label-warnings
[4]. http://grepcode.com/file/repo1.maven.org/maven2/org.primefaces/primefaces/5.2/org/primefaces/component/outputlabel/OutputLabelRenderer.java?av=f
[5]. http://grepcode.com/file/repository.springsource.com/org.apache.myfaces/com.springsource.org.apache.myfaces/1.2.2/org/apache/myfaces/renderkit/html/HtmlLabelRenderer.java?av=f

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Styling Sort Icons Using Font Awesome for Primefaces' Data Table

So far, Primefaces has used image sprites for displaying the sort icons. This leads to a problem if we want to make a different style for these icons; for example, I would make the icon "arrow up" more blurry at the first time the table loading because I want to highlight the icon "arrow down". I found a way that I can replace these icons with Font Awesome icons. We will use "CSS Pseudo-classes" to achieve it. The hardest thing here is that we should handle displaying icons in different cases. There is a case both "arrow up" and "arrow down" showing and other case is only one of these icons is shown. .ui-sortable-column-icon.ui-icon.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s { background-image: none; margin-left: 5px; font-size: 1.1666em; position: relative; } .ui-sortable-column-icon.ui-icon.ui-icon-carat-2-n-s:not(.ui-icon-triangle-1-s)::before { content: "\f106"; font-family: "FontAwesome"; position: ...

[Snippet] CSS - Child element overlap parent

I searched from somewhere and found that a lot of people says a basic concept for implementing this feature looks like below: HTML code: <div id="parent">  <div id="child">  </div> </div> And, CSS: #parent{   position: relative;   overflow:hidden; } #child{   position: absolute;   top: -1;   right: -1px; } However, I had a lot of grand-parents in my case and the above code didn't work. Therefore, I needed an alternative. I presumed that my app uses Boostrap and AngularJs, maybe some CSS from them affects mine. I didn't know exactly the problem, but I believed when all CSS is loaded into my browser, I could completely handle it. www.tom-collinson.com I tried to create an example to investigated this problem by Fiddle . Accidentally, I just changed: position: parent; to position: static; for one of parents -> the problem is solved. Look at my code: <div class="modal-body dn-placeholder-parent-positi...

Junit - Test fails on French or German string assertion

In my previous post about building a regex to check a text without special characters but allow German and French . I met a problem that the unit test works fine on my machine using Eclipse, but it was fail when running on Jenkins' build job. Here is my test: @Test public void shouldAllowFrenchAndGermanCharacters(){ String source = "ÄäÖöÜüß áÁàÀâÂéÉèÈêÊîÎçÇ"; assertFalse(SpecialCharactersUtils.isExistSpecialCharater(source)); } Production code: public static boolean isExistNotAllowedCharacters(String source){ Pattern regex = Pattern.compile("^[a-zA-Z_0-9_ÄäÖöÜüß áÁàÀâÂéÉèÈêÊîÎçÇ]*$"); Matcher matcher = regex.matcher(source); return !matcher.matches(); } The result likes the following: Failed tests: SpecialCharactersUtilsTest.shouldAllowFrenchAndGermanCharacters:32 null A guy from stackoverflow.com says: "This is probably due to the default encoding used for your Java source files. The ö in the string literal in the J...

Strategy Design Pattern

For example, I have a program with an Animal abstract class and two sub-classes Dog and Bird. I want to add new behavior for the class Animal, this is "fly".  Now, I face two approaches to solve this issue: 1. Adding an abstract method "fly" into the class Animal. Then, I force the sub-classes should be implemented this method, something like: public abstract class Animal{ //bla bla public abstract void fly(); } public class Bird extends Animal{ //bla bla public void fly(){ System.out.println("Fly high"); } } public class Dog extends Animal{ //bla bla public void fly(){ System.out.println("Cant fly"); } } 2. Creating an interface with method "fly" inside. The same issue to an abstract class, I force the classes these implement this interface should have a method "fly" inside: public interface Flyable{ public void fly(); } public class Bird implements Flyable{ //bla bla public void fly(){ System.out.pr...

JSF, Primefaces - Invoking Application Code Even When Validation Failed

A use case I have a form which has requirements as follow: - There are some mandatory fields. - Validation is triggered when changing value on each field. - A button "Next" is enable only when all fields are entered. It turns to disabled if any field is empty. My first approach I defined a variable "isDisableNext" at a backend bean "Controller" for dynamically disabling/enabling the "Next" button by performing event "onValueChange", but, it had a problem: <h:form id="personForm"> <p:outputLabel value="First Name" for="firstName"/> <p:inputText id="firstName" value="#{person.firstName}" required="true"> <p:ajax event="change" listener="#{controller.onValueChange}" update="nextButton"/> </p:inputText> <p:outputLabel value="Last Name" for="lastName"/> <p:i...