Seam drastically reduces the amount of xml coding that needs to be done. One file that is of interest is the pages.xml, packaged in the app.war file's WEB-INF directory. This file is available in the resources/WEB-INF directory in the source code bundle. The pages.xml file is used to define page descriptions including Seam page parameters (HTTP GET parameters), page actions, page navigation rules, error pages etc. Among other things it can be used in a Seam application to define exception handlers and redirections.

In the case of our sample application we are using it to define a Seam page parameter. The pages.xml in this example contains the following code:

<page view-id="/edit.xhtml">
    <param name="tid" value="#{todoDao.id}" 
           converterId="javax.faces.Long"/>
</page>

This defines a parameter named tid for the edit.xhtml page. When the edit.xhtml page is loaded, the HTTP GET request parameter tid is converted to a Long value and assigned to the id property of the todoDao object. You can have as many page parameters as required to bind HTTP GET request parameters to the back-end components in your application.