Jason Lee 2006-04-05

Yesterday, I detailed some issues I was having getting a JSF app to allow the download of an Excel spreadsheet as the result of a backing bean action being called. My solution involved a servlet and some JavaScript, with just a -pinch- a fistful of kludge. // more

Thanks to the esteemed Mr. Chad Cummings, I have a better solution, and it involves one small change to the backing bean (the navigation target returned) and the addition of this snippet to the JSF page:

<h:panelGrid columns="1" rendered="#{batchAuditReportBean.workBook != null}">
    <f:verbatim>
        <iframe src="success.jsp" style="visibility: hidden"/>
    </f:verbatim>
</h:panelGrid>

Is it still a bit of a hack? Maybe so, but it does work, and is a whole lot cleaner. That's a plus in my book, so I'm going to commit this to our Subversion repository.