This is not currently detected as a problem in the auction demo as that demo already contains many manually added IDs in the markup. These IDs were added for testing and organizational purposes, but they are also being effectively used by the DOM diff updates.

The current prototype makes use of a SystemEvent listener to modify the automatically generated IDs on outputText components so that their ID is automatically written to the output markup.

PostAddToViewEvent for the following classes are classes are detected and the "j_id*" is modified to "_id*":

(source instanceof UIOutput) ||
(source instanceof HtmlDataTable) ||
(source instanceof HtmlPanelGroup) ||
(source instanceof UICommand) ) && (!UIOutput.class.equals(source.getClass())) );

This causes the base component implementation to write the id to the output. The above list will be expanded upon further testing.

This feature is configurable through the web.xml parameter "org.icefaces.autoid" true/false (default to true). Selective "autoid" behavior (per component class) is likely not necessary, as manual configuration at that level could be performed by directly assigning IDs in the page. It may be desirable to have autoId configuration on a per-page basis through the <ice:config> tag.

To test this feature, and auction-raw.xhtml page without ids has been created (attached).

The following bug is observed with autoid=false:

Show/hide the demo notes. Then click on a bid button. This will result in a null old DOM on the server because javax.faces.ViewState is not provided in the request. These two buttons are in different forms, but both forms are updated by the show/hide operation (since clocks have also updated). This appears to be a bug in JSF 2.0, where the ViewState is only updated for one of multiple updated forms.

Please document this feature in the IF 2 WIki, incl. config. parameter, etc.

Documentation has been added to the Configuration section of the wiki.

http://wiki.icefaces.org/display/ICE/Getting+Started