ADF Faces setParent() method

Question

Hi,
I'm trying to build an ADF Faces component tree dynamically. In particular, I'm trying to add an HtmlRowLayout to an HtmlTableLayout.
Although my code appears to run without throwing errors, the <TABLE> tag that gets generated is empty. I'm not sure, but I think it might have something to do with my mechanism of adding one component to the other.
I've been calling
myHtmlRowLayout.setParent(myHtmlTableLayout);Which sort of looks like it's working. The _parent property of myHtmlRowLayout is indeed getting changed. But it doesn't look like this actually adds the HtmlRowLayout to the HtmlTableLayout's _children list.
Is there some method I have to call to "close up" the tree this way? I'd sort of expected that any process that would make X Y's parent would also make Y X's child.
Edit:
OK, I figured this out. It's not sufficient to call setParent() on the child, you have to explicitly add the child to the parent's list of children:
myHtmlTableLayout.getChildren().add(myHtmlRowLayout);So, question: What does setParent() do? THis makes it look like you could have weird asymmetric parent/child relationships: Where the child of X is Y, but the parent of Y is not X. To be on the safe side, in my code I'm calling both, but is there a use case for calling one but not the other? If not, an ER: Could setParent() do everything required to set up a parent-child relationship between two components?
Message was edited by:
Avrom

Answer 1

setParent() is a method from the JSF UIComponent class; if you want to find out what it does, check the Javadoc for JSF, which says:
Set the parent UIComponent of this UIComponent. This method must never be called by developers; a UIComponent's internal implementation will call it as components are added to or removed from a parent's child List or facet Map.
Always, just call getChildren().add() or getFacets().put(). NEVER call setParent().