apex:inputText disabled binding causing “element value must resolve to a String type!”

Question

Within my Visualforce page I'm binding to a boolean property in a controller subclass to disable a apex:inputText control.

Page Extract:

<apex:inputText id="impressions" value="{!drop.impressionsRequested}" 
    disabled="{!dropObj.impressionsDisabled}" />

Controller subclass Extract:

public with sharing class AddDropController {
    //...
    public virtual class Drop implements Comparable {
        //...

        // Should the user be able to enter impressions?
        public boolean impressionsDisabled { get; set;}

        //...
    }
    //...
}

The page seems to load fine and the text input is disabled, but when I submit back via a command button I get an error in the page Messages:

element value must resolve to a String type!

The VF_PAGE_MESSAGE appears in the log file when the sub class properties are being assigned:

If I remove the disabled attribute binding from the Visualforce markup the error does not occur.

Is there something I'm missing about binding to the disabled attribute?

Answer 1

Can you just use outputText instead if it needs to be disabled? Not the same appearance but might work for you?

<apex:outputText id="impressions" value="{!drop.impressionsRequested}" rendered="{!dropObj.impressionsDisabled}"/>

<apex:inputText id="impressions" value="{!drop.impressionsRequested}" rendered="{!NOT(dropObj.impressionsDisabled)}"/>

Or instead out output text you could just use a disabled HTML input element so it would maintain the same look:

<apex:outputPanel layout="none" rendered="{!dropObj.impressionsDisabled}">
    <input type="text" value="{!drop.impressionsRequested}"/>
</apex:outputPanel>

Answer 2

I too, experienced this issue with inputText fields that had been updated to a disabled state via javascript. There is, however, a simpler solution in at lease some situations.

While Visualforce has issues with inputText while disabled, it handles inputFields marked as "readOnly" just fine.

ie:

j$('#id_here').attr('readOnly', true); 

Answer 3

I could not add comment to Kevin's post. "readOnly" attr works fine. Here is the code

       //Make fields read only based on profile
        $('.readOnly').each(function(i){               
            element = $(document.getElementById(this.id)); 
            element.attr('readOnly', true); 
            element.css({'background-color' : '#DFD8D1'});
            element.attr('title','Insufficient Privileges');
        });