Writing plain HTML in a JSF based web application

Question

I have this use case in a JSF application.

Supposed in a JSF web application, I have a button that calls an external service that returns a complete HTML response then how can I show that HTML response to my users browsers?

The sequence of events are like this.

1. In user browser, my application is displayed. A button is there that user can click.
2. Clicking the button will call an external service. The external service will return information about a certain HTML tags. The HTML is complete with both head/body and with javascript. Currently the service can be implemented thru REST service or a plain DB call then
3. How can I display that HTML tag in my user browser?

Is this possible to write non-JSF output in a JSF web application?

Just to add, I think my problem is how to write an HTML in my backing bean and write it back to the users browser.

Answer 1

Just write it outright to the HTTP response body whereafter you instruct JSF that the response is manually completed. The principle is not much different from How to provide a file download from a JSF backing bean?, except that you need to set content disposition to inline (which is already the default anyway).

public void writeHtmlResponse() throws IOException {
    FacesContext fc = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance();
    ExternalContext ec = fc.getExternalContext();

    ec.setResponseContentType("text/html;charset=UTF-8");
    ec.setResponseCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");
    ec.getResponseOutputStream().write(html.getBytes("UTF-8"));

    fc.responseComplete(); // Important! Otherwise JSF will attempt to render the response which obviously will fail since it's already written with a file and closed.
}