JSF How to iterate over the list of a panelForm's child elements.

Question

Hi all
My users have asked me to create a "clear all" button that initializes all input values of a search form's fields to null.
To do this I created a managed bean and added the following code
public String ClearFieldsBtn_action()
String[] fieldIDs = {
"Material",
"Description",
"Length",
"Width",
"Thickness",
for (int i = 0; i < fieldIDs.length; i++ )
try {       
AttributeBinding attr = (AttributeBinding)getBindings().getControlBinding(fieldIDs);
attr.setInputValue( null);
} catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println(e.toString());
return null;
I wonder if there any other more elegant way to iterate over the fields contained inside the JSF panelForm that contains all these "Material", "Description", etc fields and thus be able to easily transport the same functionality in more that one page?
Thanks in advance
Thanassis

Answer 1

Thanassis,
I use some code like this (where "target" is a variable in the managed bean representing the parent component - the panelForm in your case):
    List children;
    int  i, cnt;
    children = target.getChildren();
    cnt = target.getChildCount();
    for (i=0; i< cnt; i++)
      // do whatever you need here, such as clearing fields
    }This doesn't operate on the model, just on the UI components themselves. I do use something like this in a superclass backing bean for when I need to iterate over a bunch of UI components.
John