1 Reply Latest reply on Jun 30, 2014 4:14 AM by marcelkolsteren

    dequeued Ajax request not processed correctly if its source element has been updated

    marcelkolsteren

      This week I found a problem in the RichFaces Ajax queuing mechanism, which can cause all JavaScript execution to stop, leaving the end user with an unresponsive page.


      The problem occurs when a request in the queue rerenders an area that includes the source element of the next request in the queue, but does not include the form of that source element. When the next request is fetched from the queue, JSF tries to find the correct form by climbing the DOM tree, starting at the source element of the event. However, because the source element has been rerendered, the path to its form is broken, and in that case JSF falls back to the first form of the page (see JavaScript function getForm that is called by jsf.ajax.request in jsf.js). If that form is not the form belonging to the rerendered version of the element, nasty things will happen.


      To illustrate this, I created a very simple Java EE 7 web application (see attached Maven project) and deployed it in WildFly 8.1.0.Final. It contains a page with one clickable link that rerenders itself when clicked:

       

      <!DOCTYPE html>

      <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"

            xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"

            xmlns:ui="http://java.sun.com/jsf/facelets"

            xmlns:a4j="http://richfaces.org/a4j">

      <h:head/>

      <h:body>

          <a4j:log level="debug"/>

          <form action="http://www.meandi.nl"/>

          <h:form>

              <a4j:commandLink action="#{richBean.doSomething}" value="Click Me" render="@this"/>

          </h:form>

          <h:outputScript library="queueing" name="queueing.js"/>

      </h:body>

      </html>


      The method "doSomething" only waits for three seconds. When the link is double clicked, you'll observe that the first click is handled correctly, but that the second click results in an Ajax request posted to the URL of the first form, leading to access denied errors (because of cross domain scripting). The used RichFaces version is 4.3.7.


      The problem can be fixed by changing the RichFaces JavaScript code, so that after completion of an Ajax request, stale elements are removed from the queue. I created a patch for RichFaces 4.3.7, and verified that it works (see attachment). Another solution strategy would be to try to find the new DOM element that corresponds to the stale source of the event, and fetch the form from that element. My thought was that removing the stale request would be better, because (1) it is kind of dangerous to process a user action on an element that has already been replaced and (2) the element might have been removed from the DOM tree by the previous rerender.


      I'm looking forward to feedback on this problem and the fix that I provided.