Programmatic changes to HtmlForm do not get rendered

Question

What I want to do sounds actually very simple:
I have a form containing a button which when clicked should dynamically add new components (input field, text) to the form. These components are added programmatically in the backing bean method which is called when the button gets clicked.
When checking the HtmlForm component in the debugger these objects properly appear in childrenList of the form object and they add up there when clicking the button multiple times.
The problem is, that the created components never appear on the page in the browser. I've been looking now for quite some time but didn't find any solution to this problem. It seems that the renderer just doesn't know that the component tree has changed. Do I have to notify the JSF framework/the renderer/whatever somehow to refresh the view?
Calling facesContext.renderResponse(); in addRow() doesn't make any difference.
What am I missing or doing wrong here? Any help is greatly appreciated. See code below...
Thanks.
Environment: Tomcat 5.5.23, MyFaces 1.1.5
the simplified JSP fragment:
    <h:form id="dynamicFormId" binding="#{dynamicFormBean.dynamicForm}">
        <h:commandButton value="Add Row" action="#{dynamicFormBean.addRow}" immediate="true"/>
    </h:form>the simplified backing bean implementation:
class DynamicFormBean {
   private HtmlForm dynamicForm;
   // the method called when the button to add components to the form is clicked
   public void addRow() {
       HtmlOutputText outputText = new HtmlOutputText();
       outputText.setId( "someid" ); // this is just for simplicity, the real code creates unique ids ...
       outputText.setValue( "some label" );
       dynamicForm.getChildren().add( outputText );
}

Answer 1

Try these small changes:
   public String addRow() {
       HtmlOutputText outputText = new HtmlOutputText();
       outputText.setId( "someid" ); // this is just for simplicity, the real code creates unique ids ...
       outputText.setValue( "some label" );
       dynamicForm.getChildren().add( outputText );
       return "reload";
   }And in your faces-config.xml file, add a navigation rule for the JSP with the dynamic form:
     <navigation-rule>
          <from-view-id>/dynamicForm.jsp</from-view-id>
          <navigation-case>
               <from-outcome>reload</from-outcome>
               <to-view-id>/dynamicForm.jsp</to-view-id>
          </navigation-case>
     </navigation-rule>Notice that I added a String return on your action method. What this should do is force JSF to reload the view, and thus the component tree (when coupled with an appropriate navigation case).
CowKing