Typical Validation Issues

[Gregg Bolinger]

I am facing a pretty typical JSF validation issue.  I have a list of commandLinks which are Categories.  On the right side of the page I have a form with details about the category.  You can also use this form to add or update a category.

Obviously, the category name is required.  But since it is blank when the page loads, and if I click on a category link to view the details, I get a validation error.  No surprise.  So I change the commandLink immediate="true" and, you guessed it, my model isn't updated so most of the details don't get populated in the form.  My commandLink code on my JSP looks like:

<t:commandLink actionListener="#{CategoryAdminBean.editCategory}">
             <t:outputText value="#{category.categoryName}" />
             <t:updateActionListener
                      property="#{ CategoryAdminBean.currentCategory}"
                      value="#{category}" />
</t:commandLink>

I've tried many different suggestions that I found on various different sites including this mailing list.  I am not interested in adding yet another dependency to this project as in a 3rd party validation library or the adf:subForm (from what I can tell, this doesn't solve the problem either).  But I would like to know what other people did to solve this similar issue, if they solved it.

Thanks.

Gregg