JSF 2.2 - The view scoped beans and the stateless feature

In a stateless environment, the view scoped beans act as request scoped beans. Besides the fact that you can't create/manipulate views dynamically, this is one of the big disadvantages that comes with the stateless feature, because it will affect AJAX-based applications that usually use view scoped beans. You can easily test this behavior with a set of beans with different scopes. The view scoped bean can be defined as follows:

@Named

@ViewScoped

public class TimestampVSBean implements Serializable{

 private Timestamp timestamp;

 public TimestampVSBean() {

  java.util.Date date = new java.util.Date();

  timestamp = new Timestamp(date.getTime());

 }

 public Timestamp getTimestamp() {

  return timestamp;

 }

 public void setTimestamp(Timestamp timestamp) {

 this.timestamp = timestamp;

 }

}

Just change the scope to request, session, and application to obtain the other three beans.

Next, we will write a simple stateless view as follows:

<f:view transient="true">

 <h:form>

  <h:commandButton value="Generate Timestamp"/>

 </h:form>

 <hr/>

 Request Scoped Bean:

 <h:outputText value="#{timestampRSBean.timestamp}"/>

 <hr/>

 View Scoped Bean:

 <h:outputText value="#{timestampVSBean.timestamp}"/>

 [keep an eye on this in stateless mode]

 <hr/>

 Session Scoped Bean:

 <h:outputText value="#{timestampSSBean.timestamp}"/>

 <hr/>

 Application Scoped Bean:

 <h:outputText value="#{timestampASBean.timestamp}"/>

 <hr/>

</f:view>

Afterwards, just submit this form several times (click on the Generate Timestamp button) and notice that the timestamp generated by the view scoped bean changes at every request as shown in the following screenshot:

The request, session, and application scopes work as expected!

You also may be interested in:

Detecting stateless views programmatically

JSF saving the view state

JSF logical and physical views

Server-state serialization in a session

JSF 2.2 is stateless