Problem with the "required" attribute in input_text (in 1.0 beta)

Question

Suppose you wanted to display a more meaningfull message instead of the default "Validation Error: Value is required", e.g. "Please enter your e-mail address". Looks like the only way to do this is to write a custom validator. However, if required="true" in the input_text, you will get the default message, if you don't set "required", your custom validator is not called at all.
This is something that needs to be addressed, because it will be very common to want to have meaningfull error messages (I can't imagine somebody will approve a commercial application which will display messages like "Validation Error: Value is required").
As a workaround, I tried setting an error message in the action handler, but I can't seem to get the component from within the bean code. In the action method I have:
FacesContext context = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance();
UIInput component = (UIInput) context.getViewRoot().findComponent("testInput");where testInput is the id of the input_text - findComponent() returns null.
P.S. Btw, I noticed that now in 1.0 the ids look like this id0:testInput which is a really bad choice if you have to write any JavaScript handler, e.g. onClick(), since id0:testInput is not a valid JavaScript variable name. You can still find it by going through all the document.forms[0].elements[n].name and set it up that way, but it's a hassle.

Answer 1

Thanks,
findComponent("formName:inputName")worked fine.
But still, I think that if you have a custom validator
it should be called regardless of whether there is
something in the input or not (or maybe bypass the
default validation if "required" attribute is set, but
there is a custom validator), because that's the only
way you can change the default "Value required"
message using a validator. If you have to check it in
the action method, you might as well do the whole
validation there, which makes validators pointless.The expert group considered this decision carefully, and concluded that the current behavior was the best -- if there is no input data, skip any specified validations -- because of the likelihood for things like null pointer exceptons in validators that are not prepared for this scenario.
One approach to dealing with this if you would prefer different behavior for your own components is to subclass UIInput and override the validate() method to do something different.
Craig