Access ViewRoot before render response in a PhaseListener

Question

Hi,
I'm trying to access UIComponents just before the render response phase to change some attributes of the UIComponents. Therefor I have created a PhaseListener, which is called before the render response phase. My idea was, to get the ViewRoot and iterate over it to access all UIComponents, but in the beforePhase, the ViewRoot has no children. How can I solve this problem?
Here is my PhaseListener:
public class SecurityPhaseListener implements PhaseListener {
    private static Log log = LogFactory.getLog(SecurityPhaseListener.class);
    public void afterPhase(PhaseEvent pe) {
    public PhaseId getPhaseId() {
        return PhaseId.RENDER_RESPONSE;
    public void beforePhase(PhaseEvent pe) {
        UIViewRoot viewRoot = pe.getFacesContext().getViewRoot();
        System.out.println("before render response " + viewRoot.getChildCount()); // returns 0
        // the following is just sample code for you to get an idea of what i want to do
        // change attributes according permissions
        for (Iterator iter = viewRoot.getChildren().iterator(); iter.hasNext();) {
            UIComponent comp = (UIComponent) iter.next();
            if(comp instanceof HtmlInputText) {
                HtmlInputText htmlInputText = (HtmlInputText) comp;
                htmlInputText.setRendered(false);
}

Answer 1

Morphy wrote:
this means that an initial call has no real life cycle...beforePhase has no component tree, afterPhase is too late.... umpf... can i alter component tree in a specialized ViewHandler?
the ViewHandler api is not deeply documented, which is the best point to hook to address this?You can, but I would use that as the last resort.
A better solution would be to use the binding attribute to get access to the component. If your getter initially returns null, JSF will create the component and then invoke the setter; at that point you can manipulate the component.