How To Reset a Form (Not as easy as you would think)?

Question

Hi All,
I'm unable to get a form to reset its value when using a commandButton that has immediate set to true.
I've got a simple little jsf page that has a form and a datatable. The form is bound to an object in a class I'm using to handle the view, the datatable is bound to a dataModel from the same handler class. The functionality I have is quite simple:
a user clicks on a commandLink in a row of the datatable
the corresponding object is loaded into a "currentObject" property of the handler class
the form fields are mapped to the "currentObject" property of the handler.
The user may update or reset the form.
The goal is to have the reset commandButton set the "currentObject" property of the handler class to null (or a new, unpopulated object) so that the fields of the form are set to blank again on render. This works fine as long as I don't use immediate="true". When I do use the immediate=true attribute, the "currentObject" variable is, indeed, set to null, but the form still renders with the old "currentObject" values in it!!
I have to use immediate="true" because there is validation going on for the form that I want to avoid.
If I use a commandButton type="reset", the fields are not cleared because the reset functionality of the browser (ie6 and firefox) resets the fields to the values they were at the time the form was displayed--the very values I wish to totally remove!
This seems like such a common, simple thing to do. What am I missing?
Thanks,
John

Answer 1

I have a similiar problem, and maybe putting buttons in a different form is the answer:
I have a page with a selectOneListbox on the left, and a set of inputs on the right. The listbox represents the available beans to select, and the set of inputs contains all the editable fields for the beans. Basically this is just a bean editor.
There is a command Button beneath the listbox for viewing a bean. When this button is clicked, the set of inputs are populated with that bean's data.
There is also a command button beneath the set of inputs that allows the user to save their changes.
All of these elements are in the same form tag.
JSF jsp:
<f:view>
  <h:form>
    <h:panelGrid columns="2">
      <h:panelGrid columns="2">
        <h:selectOneListbox size="10" value="#{editor.selectedBean}" >
          <f: selectItems value="#{editor.beanSelectItemCollection}" />
        </h:selectOneListbox>
        <h:commandButton actionListener="#{editor.view}" value="View" />
      </h:panelGrid>
      <h:panelGrid  columns="2">
        <h:inputText value="#{editor.editingBean.property}" />
        <h:commandButton actionListener="#{editor.save}" value="Save" />
      </h:panelGrid>
    </h:panelGrid>
  </h:form>
</f:view>Editor bean:
public class Editor {
  // use a blank bean as default
  // so the editor is populated with blanks
  private Bean editingBean = new Bean();
  // don't initially select any beans
  private Bean selectedBean = null;
  private Map beans = new HashMap();
  public Editor() {
  public void save(ActionEvent e) {
    beans.put(editingBean.getId(), editingBean);
  public void view (ActionEvent e) {
    editingBean = (Bean)selectedBean.clone();
  // getters and setters
  public Bean getEditingBean() {
    return editingBean;
  public void setEditingBean(Bean b) {
    editingBean = b;
  public Bean getSelectedBean() {
    return selectedBean;
  public void setSelectedBean(Bean b) {
    selectedBean = b;
  // before entering the JSP for this bean, this method should be called
  // to populate the editor
  public void setBeans(Collection c) {
    beans.clear();
    for (Iterator i = c.iterator(); i.hasNext(); ) {
      Bean b = (Bean)i.next();
      beans.put(b.getId(), b);
  public Collection getBeans() {
    return beans.values();
  public Collection getBeanSelectItemCollection() {
    Collection items = new ArrayList(beans.size());
    for (Iterator i = beans.values().iterator(); i.hasNext(); ) {
      items.add(new SelectItem(bean, bean.getProperty());
    return items;
}Here comes the problem:
If I want to set fields as required or use any of the JSF validation functionality, my view usecase breaks. This happens if the user views bean1 changes some data to be invalid/not existant and then tries to view bean2. If they don't click the save button, validation/required should not be checked. My initial thought is that I should be able to set my view button and view listbox to be immediate. This does properly update the view listbox, but then if I change the values in the backing bean for the set of inputs, those changes are never updated to the screen, and the set of inputs is still populated with bean1's data even though the backing bean for all those inputs is now bean2.
It appears that the view never requeries the backing bean when responseComplete() is called (which happens with an immediate command). Is this a bug in faces, or is this how the spec says it is supposed to behave? If this is the correct behavior what is a better practice to acheieve my usecase?
My current workaround is to ignore faces validation and manually validate when the user clicks the save command, and then manually set the messages for the bad components. Obviously, this is not an ideal solution, but I was hoping that this faces behavior was incorrect and thus my solution would be temporary.
I'm not tied to a specific solution, but I am discouraged that Adam says in order to reset the set of inputs, we have to manually update the model during the apply request values phase.