Overriding a controls renderer

Question

I'm having the following issue with the OpenNTF Bootstrap4XPages plugin: the NamePicker control uses a the Bootstrap renderer which displays it without the search field or the "add" field. I have raised this an issue on OpenNTF but in the meantime, I figured I would attempt to apply the ExtLib renderer for this control.

To date I have tried adding "com.ibm.xsp.extlib.OneUINamePicker" directly to the Renderer-Type property on the control (didn't work), added a renderer property set (taken from the ExtLib source) to the faces-config.xml (didn't work) both with theme enabled and disabled on the control.

So my questions are a) is this possible and b) if so, what am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

The issue only occurred with the Bootstrap 3 themes. In the Bootstrap 2 themes, the correct renderer class was used.

I traced this down to a bug in the ExtLib theme file for Bootstrap 3. I've fixed it in the source code by setting the correct renderer class, so this will be solved in the next release.

See also: https://github.com/OpenNTF/Bootstrap4XPages/issues/59

Answer 2

Thanks to Tim's comment, I had a moment of clarity in which I realised that I had been an idiot and had overcomplicated matters. I didn't need to worry about changing the renderer-type/adding a custom renderer. The simple answer was just to disable the theme for the NamePicker control which then forced it to use the ExtLib renderer anyway, giving me back the search button and both fields, albeit without styling.