Dealing with javax.faces.application.ViewExpiredException in jsf 1.2

Question

Hello,
I am working on a jsf 1.2 application and I am trying to implement a way to deal with the ViewExpiredException. Here is what I tried:
<error-page>
<exception-type>javax.faces.application.ViewExpiredException</exception-type>
<location>/WEB-INF/include/viewExpired.jsf</location>
</error-page>
(there is a viewExpired.xhtml file in the same folder as the jsf file)
What happens is that the above exception is indeed thrown by my app by an ajax component but the error page is not displayed leaving the user with an application that is not working.
Can anyone please help?
Thanks in advance,
Julien.

Answer 1

Facelets tends to wrap exceptions into generic ones; anything that is not an IOException or a RuntimeException is wrapped into a FacesException. Thus your ViewExpiredException is not the top-level exception anymore and the error-page rule won't work.
The way I work around this is to define my own view handler to be able to deal with exceptions myself. I figured this out from some article, but I cannot find it anymore. So I'll just post what I have:
public class MyFaceletsViewHandler extends FaceletViewHandler {
  // TODO: replace with your own log API
  protected Logger  logger = Logger.getLogger(getClass().getName());
  public MyFaceletsViewHandler(ViewHandler parent) {
    super(parent);
  protected void handleRenderException(FacesContext context, Exception ex) throws IOException, ELException, FacesException {
    try {
      Throwable rootcause = findRootCause(ex);
      context.getExternalContext().getSessionMap().put("exception", rootcause);
      logger.error("Error rendering view!", ex);
      // TODO: put correct path to error page here
      ((HttpServletResponse) context.getExternalContext().getResponse()).sendRedirect("error.jsf");
      context.responseComplete();
    catch (IOException ioe) {
      logger.fatal("Could not process redirect to handle application error", ioe);
  private Throwable findRootCause(Throwable t){
    Throwable ret = t;
    while(ret.getCause() != null && ret.getCause() != ret){
      ret = ret.getCause();
    return ret;
  }And in your faces-config.xml:
<application>
        <view-handler>package.to.MyFaceletsViewHandler</view-handler>
    </application>In the view handler you can then target specific exceptions if you want, like your ViewExpiredException. I added a little trickery to search for the root cause of the exception; that is usually the only part of an exception stacktrace that I'm interested in.
If anybody knows a better way to deal with specific exceptions in facelets, please share.