The current rowSelector implementation automatically selects a dataTable row when you click anywhere within the row. While this works well most of the time, there are use-cases where the automatic selection behavior is not desirable. For example, in the case where you have a checkbox or a selectOneRadio component in the row and you click the component to change its' selection state, instead you get the row being selected/deselected instead, which is not the intended result.

In these cases it is not good UI design to have the dataTable row be automatically selected by clicking over it in locations other than over specific components that need to interpret the clicking action themselves as this approach provides no obvious affordance for toggling the row selection state. You must be able to either click anywhere within the row to toggle the selection-state, or instead click a specific control within the row (usually at the right or left edge) to do so. For example, having a checkbox that is used to toggle the selected state.

To resolve this issue the rowSelector should be enhanced to support the optional disabling of the automatic row selection feature and instead support programmatic selecting of dataTable rows based on another event. In the case of the example above, when the user toggles the value of the checkbox in the each row the row selection status would be programatically toggled in response by the application.