How to avoid re-execution of last form submit action when the page is refreshed?

Question

I am working on project which is developed in JSF. Whenever we are refreshing the JSF page, then the last action event is re-executed. For example, when I submit the form to

Answer 1

The symptoms indicate that the page was requested by a POST request and that you're ignoring the webbrowser's warning that the data will be resent when refreshing the request. Refreshing a POST request will of course result in it being re-executed. This is not a JSF specific problem.

The common solution to that is to send a redirect to a GET request after executing the POST request. This way the client will end up having the GET request in the browser view. Refreshing this will then only re-execute the GET request which doesn't (shouldn't) modify anything (unless you're doing this in the constructor of a request scoped bean associated with the view). This is also known as the POST-Redirect-GET pattern.

With JSF 2.0, you can achieve this by simply adding faces-redirect=true parameter to the bean action's outcome.

public String submit() {
    // ...

    return "viewid?faces-redirect=true";
}

If you're still using old fashioned s in faces-config.xml, then the same effect can be achieved by adding to the case.

The only disadvantage is that request scoped beans are garbaged this way (a redirect basically instructs the webbrowser to create a brand new request) and thus you cannot pass data in the request scope in order to redisplay it in the redirected page. For example, displaying a success message. In JSF 2.0 you could instead use the flash scope for this or to just let the POST take place by submit instead of a normal submit.