Clicking an element in a list doesn't work

Question

Sorry about my rather vague subject - my problem is not so easy to sum up in a few words.
I am working on an application that
- Displays a list of items from a MySQL table
- Each item should be clickable, and on clicking should open an edit page with the clicked item pre-loaded
This must have been done millions of times before and should be simple. It doesn't work, presumably because I know too little. This is what I have done:
The clickable item list looks like this (without all the trimmings):
<h:dataTable id="users" value="#{userlist.userList()}" var="ul">
<h:commandLink action="#{ul.edituser}" value="#{ul.uid}"/>
This displays a list of the right sort of items, but the clickable item (the UID) doesn't do anything. Also, the resulting html looks the same no matter what I put into the action element - this is the inside of the a-tag:
href="#" onclick="mojarra.jsfcljs(document.getElementById('j_idt9'),{'j_idt9:users:1:j_idt15':'j_idt9:users:1:j_idt15'},'');return false"
I'm not entirely sure what that means; all I know is that it does not call the edituser() method.
But what is the right way, then? I haven't found any examples that highlight this particular situation although it must be used all the time, I expect.

Answer 1

#{userlist.userList()
#{ul.edituser}Spot the difference there. I do believe "ul" should be "userlist"; in other words it will link to an action method "edituser()" in a JSF managed bean which I assume will be named Userlist. Its really simple when you run into the problem of an action method not working: 99/100 times the action method EL declaration is wrong. Now it could be typo, but I've been known to forget the #{} part too...
I use the JBoss Tools Eclipse plugin myself; it has nice JSF additions that add EL validation and autocompletion to the editor. That way I know already from the code view when I've made a mistake in stead of "at runtime". A missing action method turns up as a warning in the jsf editor for example. That is of course only helpful when you're actually using Eclipse ;)