Our first approach was to create a DefaultFocusBehavior (as described by Julian Sinai) and attach it to the component which should receive the focus. The problem with this is that after a validation error during a submit, you usually want the focus to jump to the first invalid field, so the user can easily correct his erroneous input. The problem with the DefaultFocusBehavior is that the component to which you added it still has it and will try to grab the focus again. We created two methods for handling focus in our BasePage class (from which all of our application pages are inherited) – setFocus and setFocusToFirstInvalidComponent. The first one is called during page initialization and the second on validation failure. They share enough class variables which allow them to ensure that only one component has the DefaultFocusBehavior at a time.
