Putting a script into an ICEfaces page

<script type="text/javascript">
alert("Beep");
</script>

Currently gets rendered out as:

<script type="text/javascript">
<span id = "_components_buttonsAndLinks_WAR_componentshowcase_INSTANCE_2nr4_ :j_id4">alert("Beep");</span>
</script>

Wrapping the contents in a <span> causes the code to, obviously, not execute. The problem surfaces in the 1.7 branch on revision 17279.

The problem according to Mark is:

With JSF 1.1, generated ids are of the form _idNUMBER, whereas with JSF 1.2, they are j_id_NUMBER.

In TextRenderer, part of the logic to have a span is:

if (idNotNull(uiComponent) && !uiComponent.getId().startsWith("_")) {
  return true;
}

Which means, if the component has an id, and it was specifically given, and not generated, than use a span. But the heuristic for it not being generated was for JSF 1.1, not JSF 1.2. It worked out, because we had put in place our own generated id scheme, for plain text, that was _iceIDNUMBER, which started with the underscore. Changing that to use the JSF 1.2 generated id broke things.

The solution is not to back out the generated id fix. Instead we could update TextRenderer to use a better heuristic for having a specified id. Or we could just set a flag on OutputText, so it will just not put spans around plain text. There's the little question of when <ice:outputText> is used (and not plain text), and no id was given, so it's generated, what we're supposed to do, use a span or not.