How can I show/hide component with JSF?

Generally, you need to get a handle to the control via its clientId. This example uses a JSF2 Facelets view with a request-scope binding to get a handle to the other control:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8' ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
  "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
      xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html">
  <h:head><title>Show/Hide</title></h:head>
  <h:body>
    <h:form>
      <h:button value="toggle"
               onclick="toggle('#{requestScope.foo.clientId}'); return false;" />
      <h:inputText binding="#{requestScope.foo}" id="x" style="display: block" />
    </h:form>
    <script type="text/javascript">
      function toggle(id) {
        var element = document.getElementById(id);
        if(element.style.display == 'block') {
          element.style.display = 'none';
        } else {
          element.style.display = 'block'
        }
      }
    </script>
  </h:body>
</html>

Exactly how you do this will depend on the version of JSF you're working on. See this blog post for older JSF versions: JSF: working with component identifiers.


You should use <h:panelGroup ...> tag with attribute rendered. If you set true to rendered, the content of <h:panelGroup ...> won't be shown. Your XHTML file should have something like this:

<h:panelGroup rendered="#{userBean.showPassword}">
    <h:outputText id="password" value="#{userBean.password}"/>
</h:panelGroup>

UserBean.java:

import javax.faces.bean.ManagedBean;
import javax.faces.bean.SessionScoped;
@ManagedBean
@SessionScoped
public class UserBean implements Serializable{
    private boolean showPassword = false;
    private String password = "";

    public boolean isShowPassword(){
        return showPassword;
    }
    public void setPassword(password){
        this.password = password;
    }
    public String getPassword(){
        return this.password;
    }
}

You can actually accomplish this without JavaScript, using only JSF's rendered attribute, by enclosing the elements to be shown/hidden in a component that can itself be re-rendered, such as a panelGroup, at least in JSF2. For example, the following JSF code shows or hides one or both of two dropdown lists depending on the value of a third. An AJAX event is used to update the display:

<h:selectOneMenu value="#{workflowProcEditBean.performedBy}">
    <f:selectItem itemValue="O" itemLabel="Originator" />
    <f:selectItem itemValue="R" itemLabel="Role" />
    <f:selectItem itemValue="E" itemLabel="Employee" />
    <f:ajax event="change" execute="@this" render="perfbyselection" />
</h:selectOneMenu>
<h:panelGroup id="perfbyselection">
    <h:selectOneMenu id="performedbyroleid" value="#{workflowProcEditBean.performedByRoleID}"
                     rendered="#{workflowProcEditBean.performedBy eq 'R'}">
        <f:selectItem itemLabel="- Choose One -" itemValue="" />
        <f:selectItems value="#{workflowProcEditBean.roles}" />
    </h:selectOneMenu>
    <h:selectOneMenu id="performedbyempid" value="#{workflowProcEditBean.performedByEmpID}"
                     rendered="#{workflowProcEditBean.performedBy eq 'E'}">
        <f:selectItem itemLabel="- Choose One -" itemValue="" />
        <f:selectItems value="#{workflowProcEditBean.employees}" />
    </h:selectOneMenu>
</h:panelGroup>

Use the "rendered" attribute available on most if not all tags in the h-namespace.

<h:outputText value="Hi George" rendered="#{Person.name == 'George'}" />