Best practices for adding components in a composite custom component

Question

Hello,
I am developing a custom, composite JSF component need to dynamically add child components in my renderer class. I've noticed that people add components to a custom component in many different ways. I'd like to follow JSF best practices when developing this component - of the following approaches, which would you recommend? Or is there yet another approach I should be using?
1) in the encodeBegin method of my renderer class, create a new component, add it to the component tree, and let the page life cycle take care of the rendering:
HtmlDataList dimensionStateGroupDataList = (HtmlDataList) app.createComponent( HtmlDataList.COMPONENT_TYPE );
//set properties on dimensionStateGroupDataList
component.getChildren().add(dimensionStateGroupDataList);
2) in either the encodeBegin or encodeEnd method, create a component and encode it:
HtmlDataList dimensionStateGroupDataList = (HtmlDataList) app.createComponent( HtmlDataList.COMPONENT_TYPE );
//set properties on dimensionStateGroupDataList
dimensionStateGroupDataList.encodeBegin();
dimensionStateGroupDataList.encodeEnd();
Both of these methods are functional, and I prefer the first (why encode children if you don't have to?), but I am interested in other people's take on how this should be done.
Thanks for your help.
-Christopher

Answer 1

My bad, sorry, wasnt concentrating, Im afraid I have no experience with portlets, but I would have thought that you can mimic the outputLinkEx in you renderer by encoding your own links?
If you were to bind a backing bean variable to an outputLinkEx what would it be? Not understanding portlets, or knowing what an outputLinkEx is may be hindering me, but you should be able to create an instance of it in code like (this example uses HtmlOutputLink, you would need to know which component to use):
HtmlOutputLink hol = new HtmlOutputLink();
hol.set....Then set any attributes on it, and explicitly call its encodeStart, encodeEnd functions. Is that way off the mark.