AjaxAnywhere, state management and multiple forms

[Andrew Robinson <an...@gmail.com>]

I'm trying to get a wizard functionality going  with AA. My parent
page has a panel that is in a "default" state. A button in this panel
should cause a navigation to occur to the next page.

The main page does have buttons that should continue to work.

So I have next, back, finish and cancel buttons in my wizard (inside
the AA zone).

Problem 1: on the 2nd wizard page, the form is submitting still back
to page one instead of back to page 2 since the form is outside of the
AA zone and not in it.

I would rather not submit back to the parent form each time as it
renders a datatable outside of the AA zone and other such controls
that are expensive to created. I also would like to use the navigation
rules from the faces-config.xml to handle the wizard buttons.

Problem 2: w/ server-side JSF state and multiple files, my buttons
outside of AA stop working correctly because the view state is invalid
(I'd rather not use client state if I can help it)

I know about Shale and JBoss-Seam to manage dialog state (which
basically this is), but for my day job, we are not using either at the
moment.

Has anyone come up with a work around for this?