Buggy dataTable

Question

I've been fighting with dataTable for several days now. It looks like its implementation is EXTREMLY buggy. Here is a code snippet which reproduces the bug:
<h:form>
     <h:dataTable value="#{broker.list}" var="data" border="1">
          <h:column>
              <f:facet name="header">
                    <h:outputText value="Id" />
              </f:facet>
              <h:commandLink actionListener="#{broker.initDetails}" action="details">
                  <h:outputText value="#{data.id}"/>
                  <f:param name="id" value="#{data.id}"/>
              </h:commandLink>
          </h:column>
     </h:dataTable>
     <h:commandLink action="#{broker.reload}">
          <h:outputText value="More values"/>
     </h:commandLink>
</h:form>In short, this code displays a table of item ids. Upon clicking on an item a new page is displayed detailing the selected item. Also there's More Values button allowing to select more values from the DB. This is the initDetails method from broker:
public void initDetails(ActionEvent actionevent) throws AbortProcessingException {
       FacesContext facesContext = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance();
       Integer id = null;
       for (Iterator it = actionevent.getComponent().getChildren().iterator(); it.hasNext(); )
             UIComponent child = (UIComponent)it.next();
             if (child instanceof UIParameter)
                  String name = ((UIParameter)child).getName();
                  if (name.equals("id"))
                        id = (Integer)((UIParameter)child).getValue();
       if (id == null)
            throw new AbortProcessingException("No id parameter given.");
       setId(id.intValue());
}Now what happens is when I click on an item just after loading the page for the first time, I get the details page with the correct item. However, if I first click More Values button to see the next items and then click on an item, I get the details of a wrong item! More precisely I get the details of the item that was on this place before clicking More Values. Even more pricesely: if I have 2 items per page than clicking on the item
3 (on the second subset) I get the details for the item 1, clicking on the item 4 I get the details for the item 2.
After digging into sources for several days, I decided that dataTable caches its first set of values and then restores it after each subsequent restoreView phase until I go to another page and its state is lost. It is only after the state is lost, does the dataTable refresh its contents from the source.
Also there's another sad side effect of this buggy implemntation: When I click on the item the dataTable tries to restore its values from the source during the restoreView phase even though its not needed to display the details of this item.
As far as I have been able to understand from the sources, this bug has something to do with storing and restoring valueBindingMap. After restoration it retains links to the previous list of items.
MyFaces has its own dataTable implementation which can explicitly store items in the stateManager. It works fine except for the fact that it increases the amount of data send to/from the client.
I haven't found a solution to this problem. Reports of this bug has been here several times, but in other circumstances.
I'd LOVE to see a general solution to this problem, not just a walkaround in this particular case, because this example is intended to reproduce the bug only. I've faced it in other cases for several times!

Answer 1

There are no validation errors nor conversion errors, because there's just nothing to validate or convert! The page consists only of the list of items. These are the methods:
private boolean showFirst = true;
public String reload() {
       showFirst = !showFirst;
       return "";
public Vector getList() throws SQLException {
       Vector list = new Vector();
       Connection con = null;
       PreparedStatement st = null;
       ResultSet r = null;
       try {
             con = getGlobals().getCon();
             if(showFirst)
                st = con.prepareStatement("select * from `faces_students` where `id`<=2");
             else
                st = con.prepareStatement("select * from `faces_students` where `id`>2");
             r = st.executeQuery();
             while(r.next()) {
                   Data d = new Data();
                   d.setId(r.getInt("id"));
                   list.add(d);
       } finally {
             try {
                r.close();
             } catch(Exception e) {
             try {
                    st.close();
              } catch(Exception e) {
       return list;
}The Data object contains only member variables and accessors.