Programmatically use a view filter function

Question

Are there any way to activate the built-in filter functionality from the SDK? (The one on top of a view: Edit Criteria->Add Criteria)
I need to make a task, which filters the current view, based on what the user selects in my task.
More specifically: A view has a number of columns, one of them being Classification Category. So by using a list of those, can I take the users input, and use it to filter a view by Classification Category?
Alternatively, as I suspect the above isn't possible, how do I display a list of incidents in a custom form? Something like the search window, I would like to be able to display a list of incidents, which corresponds to some criteria, and enable the users to
double-click to open them.

Answer 1

Yes, essentially. I'd like to define the content of my emails in facelets via XHTML files, ideally with as few restrictions on what parts of JSF/facelets can be used as possible.
To be a little more explicit, suppose I've defined my email contents in /WEB-INF/email.xhtml and it has parameters x, y and z. I'd like to have a class, say MagicViewRenderer, which could do the following:
MagicViewRenderer mvr = new MagicViewRenderer(facesContext);
mvr.setParameter("x", objX);
mvr.setParameter("y", objY);
mvr.setParameter("z", objZ);
String contents = mvr.render("/WEB-INF/email.xhtml");
// Use contents as the body of an email message