Action on rerender

Question

I have a page with a form. My question is, if when I rerender a part of the form, its input values can simply be populated by '' or null.

                <apex:pageBlockSection id="generalInfo" columns="2">
                   <apex:inputField label="Name" value="{!newName}" required="true"/>
                   <apex:inputField label="Date" value="{!newDate}" onfocus="DatePicker.pickDate(false, this , false);" required="true" }
           </apex:pageBlockSection>    
           <apex:pageBlockSection id="placeType" title="Additional Information" columns="2">
                    <apex:pageBlockSectionItem >
                    <apex:outputLabel for="place">Place</apex:outputLabel>  
                    <apex:actionRegion >
                        <apex:selectRadio value="{!place}" id="place">                           
                            <apex:selectOptions value="{!items}"/>                            
                            <apex:actionSupport event="onchange" rerender="placeType" status="status"/>                           
                        </apex:selectRadio>
                    </apex:actionRegion>
                    </apex:pageBlockSectionItem>
                    <apex:inputField label="The type" value="{!newType}" required="true"/>
            </apex:pageBlockSection>

The problem is, the !newType field is populated before the page is rendered... It's like if I only need for the page to fetch this value the first time, when it renders, and then ignore it's previous value and render as blank.

Best regards.

Answer 1

Assuming that you want 'anytime the field containing {!newType} is rerendered, you want to clear the current value'.

There are 2 ways to do this. 1 way could be to use either javascript or jQuery in order to fetch the field and clear it each time your 'onchange' event fires.

Another option is to force a call to an actionFunction which calls a method in your controller to run code to set 'newType = null;'.

Either option should work. Mostly depends if you wish to have the work server side or client side.