We have developed this recipe with NetBeans 6.8, JSF 2.0, and GlassFish v3. The JSF 2.0 classes were obtained from the NetBeans JSF 2.0 bundled library.

For loading the message resource bundle we use the core tag f:loadBundle. This loads the bundle and stores it in the request scope. For example:

<f:loadBundle basename="custom.MyMessages" var="msg"/>

Usually, this line appears after an <f:view> tag and the attribute basename indicates the location and name of the resource bundle, while the variable's name is specified by the var attribute of the f:loadBundle element (for example, msg).

Now you can display a localized string from our message resource bundle with a JSF component.

<h:outputText value="#{msg.HELLO_WORLD}"/>

The resource bundle is also registered in faces-config.xml, as shown next:

<application>
<message-bundle>custom.MyMessages</message-bundle>
</application>

When JSF finds the f:loadBundle tag, it tries to load the specified message resource bundle and assign a variable to it, through the var attribute. Now, this var can be used globally in JSF page for writing ELs to indicate the desired messages. Usually, this is done by indicating the message's key.

The code bundled with this book contains a complete example of this recipe. The project can be opened with NetBeans 6.8 and it is named: Load_the_message_resource_bundle_in_JSF.