Conditional rendering of non-JSF components (plain vanilla HTML and template text)

Solution 1:

I cannot use <h:panelGroup> as it will render to <span> or <div>

Apparently you didn't test it carefully. The <h:panelGroup> won't render anything if you don't specify attributes which should end up in the client side, like layout, id, styleClass, etc.

Thus, this should technically perfectly work fine.

<h:panelGroup rendered="#{negotiator.maySend}">
    <tr> my tr stuff </tr>
</h:panelGroup>

However, better for the main purpose would be to use <ui:fragment>.

<ui:fragment rendered="#{negotiator.maySend}">
    <tr> my tr stuff </tr>
</ui:fragment>

This is by the way also possible with <f:verbatim>, but this is deprecated since JSF 2.0 as it's designed specifically for usage in JSP.

See also:

• Alternative to ui:fragment in JSF
• Conditionally displaying JSF components
• How to find out client ID of component for ajax update/render? Cannot find component with expression "foo" referenced from "bar"
• Ajax update/render does not work on a component which has rendered attribute