Switching dynamic tabs causes loss of entered values

Question

I am running into a fundamental issue with dynamic tabs.
When the user has multiple tabs open, and he is busy entering values in one tab, and then switches to another tab without saving the values in the first tab, the entered values in the first tab are lost when the user triggers at least one http request in the new tab. If the user switches to the new tab, does not do anything and returns immediately to the first tab, the entered values are still there. I understand that the JSF model update phase is skipped when switching tabs because immediate="true". But the apply request values phase is still performed, so the UI components should still have the submitted value. Somehow, these values get lost when a subsequent request is send while those UI components are no longer visible. I tried changing the rendered property of the regions in the page template to "visible" so the UI components are kept in the component tree, but that didn't help.
Th idea of temporarily switching to another task, similar to switching browser tabs, is undermined with this behavior because end users don't like it when some of their work is lost.
Does anybody know a solution for this problem?
Thanks,
Steven.

Answer 1

I think you need to use static instead of dynamic regions that way you can keep the region modification across all the tabs. The visible property on the regions some how its not working for me so I am surronding each region with PageGroupLayout and setting the visible property to it and set rendered property to region. The visible property and rendered property condition can be controlled by the tab action.