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Escaping XML in XML in JSF

Posted by Roger Keays, 14 June 2008, 1:26 AM

Recently I discovered that my RSS feeds were broken because of the Latin characters in the content. JSF's h:outputText unhelpfully converts these to HTML entities which are invalid in XML files such as RSS feeds. Even with escape="false", the HTML markup still breaks the feed. Short of writing an XML renderer for h:outputText, I came up with the following putrid hack. It is an ugly stain on my otherwise beautiful code, a parasite to perfection, a car wreck on the corner of Coro Drive and Moggill Road, a pile of puppy poo on the pavement. But it works...

<title>
  <h:outputText value="&lt;![CDATA[" escape="false"/>
  <h:outputText value="${item.title}" escape="false"/>
  <h:outputText value="]]&gt;" escape="false"/>
</title>

Repeat for all output in your XML/RSS templates.

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Comment posted by: Ryan Lubke on 28/07/2008 12:07:50 PM

I'm curious, which impl/version of JSF were you using when you hit this issue?

Comment posted by: Roger Keays on 28/07/2008 12:10:35 PM

Mojarra 1.2.04_p02

Comment posted by: Ryan Lubke on 29/07/2008 1:12:20 AM

Might give 1.2_09 a shot.  We added a config parameter called com.sun.faces.disableUnicodeEscaping which may resolve this issue.

See the release notes [1] for details. 

[1] http://tinyurl.com/5txnpo