Gotcha when using AdfPage.PAGE to find components on your page

When using JavaScript with ADF, the AdfPage.PAGE.findComponentByAbsoluteId() and AdfPage.PAGE.findComponent() and invaluable tools. But there is a watch-out when using them in certain situations.  If you use JSF fragments , and probably you do (if you don't, then probably you should), then these functions might give you trouble. You might not be able to find the component (returns null/undefined) . In this case, you can try to look at the region that using your task flow and try to reconstruct the ID you need to be looking for. For example, if the ID for a command button is 'button1' and the jsff is in a task flow and the task flow is in a region with ID 'region1' on a jspx, then inspecting the button from firebug using Firefox, I would see 'region1:0:button1' . You could use that in your JavaScript, but  I don't really like that path though, because, if you end up portletizing your app, then you no longer have a .jspx, that would be created elsewhere, and you may not know/cannot depend on the how the actual run-time layout of the ID is going to be. The bottom line is you would need a backing bean method to find the actual run time ID of the component and then pass that to these functions. So effectively your Javascript gets moved in to the backing bean and you would be generating it at run-time (getting the real run-time IDs and setting them in to the function calls) and injecting the JavaScript and running it. Something like this would do the trick (example is from this post and it finds the actual ID for an af:popup on the page and calls popup.show() or popup.hide() ) :

public void toggleBusyPopup(boolean isShown){
    FacesContext context = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance();
    RichPopup popup = (RichPopup) JSFUtils.findComponent("busyPopup");
    ExtendedRenderKitService service =
      Service.getRenderKitService(context, ExtendedRenderKitService.class);
    if (isShown){
      service.addScript(context,
                        "var popup = AdfPage.PAGE.findComponent(\"" +
                        popup.getClientId(context) + "\"); popup.show();");
    }
    else{
      service.addScript(context,
                        "var popup = AdfPage.PAGE.findComponent(\"" +
                        popup.getClientId(context) + "\"); popup.hide();");
    }
    return;
  }