How to make JSF render binary data

Question

Hi Everybody,
I am trying to make JSF render some binary data. I have my own components, set of renderers and render kit all implemented.
Still, I get several problems, one of them seems to bo implementation of UIComponentTag (in Sun's reference implementation, but, on the first glance,MyFaces has the same problem).
If you are rendering response, you should use either ResponseWriter or ResponseStream, not both of them, correct ? But UIComponentTag directly creates ResponseWriter in doStartTag() code - and what are my chances to use ResponseStream somewhere ? I was thinking about UIComponent subclassing ( re-implementing doStartTag() and doEndTag() ), but it does not seems to be easy if you are NOT calling parent's methods .
Of course, I can access servlet's responseStream through facesContext and do anything I would like, but it seems to be more than a hack
So - does anybody has a positive experience of making JSF render binary data, or this is more a theoretical possibility ?
Regards, Nikolajs Krasnikovs

Answer 1

If the data bean is request scoped, then just load it in its constructor or initialization block.
If it is session scoped, add the following lines to the getter of the datamodel:
if (FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().getRenderResponse()) {
    // Reload data list here.
}Also see the following article for some new insights: http://balusc.blogspot.com/2006/06/using-datatables.html