You cannot use the conditional operator ?: In expressions of values and actions. Expressing a value will raise a PropertyNotWritableException in the form of submit because the EL syntax is not a write operation, instead it is a read-only operation. The action expression would already load ELException: not a valid method expression on the page load, because the EL syntax is not a method expression, but a value expression.
You need to solve it differently, and then in such a way that you can get rid of the conditional operator ?: In expressions of value and action in general. This can be achieved in several ways:
Using an abstract base class and tag file. Currently, your bean subcategory names are unfortunately not aligned in such a way that they are the same for both classes. You only aligned the globalFilter property, but the action listener methods did not execute. I suggest renaming them to filter() and resetFilter() . You can then extract the abstract base class from these bean classes and use it in the custom tag file , as shown below:
<my:filter beanName="#{param.from eq 'TERMINAL' ? 'terminalsList' : 'merchantsList'}" />
which is implemented as follows (assuming those beans have a request scope):
<h:inputText value="#{requestScope[beanName].globalFilter}" size="50" /> <h:commandButton value="Filter" actionListener="#{requestScope[beanName].filter}" /> <h:commandButton value="Reset" actionListener="#{requestScope[beanName].resetFilter}" />
(if your bean is in a different area, just change #{requestScope} accordingly, for example #{viewScope} )
Using JSTL to conditionally build a view. This is really awkward (not DRY ), but perhaps easier for the starter and actually the only way if you cannot change the method signatures for some strange reason.
<c:choose> <c:when test="#{param.from eq 'TERMINAL'}"> <h:inputText value="#{terminalsList.globalFilter}" size="50" /> <h:commandButton value="Filter" actionListener="#{terminalsList.filterTerminals}" /> <h:commandButton value="Reset" actionListener="#{terminalsList.resetTerminalsFilter}" /> </c:when> <c:otherwise> <h:inputText value="#{merchantsList.globalFilter}" size="50" /> <h:commandButton value="Filter" actionListener="#{merchantsList.filterMerchants}" /> <h:commandButton value="Reset" actionListener="#{merchantsList.resetMerchantsFilter}" /> </c:otherwise> </c:choose>