Through the looking-glass with JDeveloper and ADF

Upcoming Presentations at the Midwest Oracle Users Group

2010-10-30T16:59:00.000-07:00

Just thought I would mention as I'm getting together my materials for my trip back to the windy city that I will be presenting next week at the Midwest Oracle Users Group annual conference on Friday, November 5th.

I'll be presenting the following:

SOA Integration & Application Development Framework: 8:15-9:15am
Oracle Fusion Development Platform: JDeveloper & ADF : 9:15-10:15am
RIAs and Web 2.0 made Simple: 1-2pm

If you happen to be in the Chicago area, you should attend and feel free to swing by and chat.

Creating a search page using the ADF Faces Rich Client Search Form context option

2010-10-30T16:10:00.000-07:00

Okay, so like I said in my video on creating LOVs, I've gone ahead and made a follow-up video that actually demonstrates using the ADF Search Form context option that we used in the LOV demo as our form option. In this video, I take the view object that we created the LOV on and create a search page with a results section to highlight how easy it can be to do so using ADF.

I also refer to an example of creating a search page using a bind variable based view object that was pointed out to me by my friend Shay Shmeltzer. It is also an excellent sample, and when I was just reviewing it I had to chuckle because in my LOV demo writeup I referenced creating a af:selectOneChoice in the page designer rather than having it created and persisted on the actual View Object, Shays demo shows it, excellent! One thing to take note of though, is that the method he shows does not persist the LOV relationships that are formed when creating the page, they're only relevant for that particular page. So, if you dropped that same View Object (as we do in this search form demo) on another page you wouldn't get the LOV functionality that we get here.

Find my new video below:

So as you can see in the demo, the search form feature is a powerful, effective, and often overlooked feature in the ADF visual designer. The other thing you might have noticed is that when I showed how the controls on the execute button of the search form automatically registered the table as a partial target, there was another item registered there as well. That is because I had used the same data control to create a table on a separate tab on that same page. As a result, the button registered that table as a target as well.

This can be a nice benefit, or an unexpected behavior if you were to navigate around and suddenly a table on another part of the page that was previously displaying the full set of data from that data control was suddenly displaying a filtered set of data. There is nothing preventing you from taking the other tables off the partial target list for the search form, just be aware that the iterator containing the data under the covers has still been filtered by the actions of the search form.

If you want the data sets to be independent when you implement a search form off a data control that is used in other places; you can create an independent data control that is to be used just for the search form and results, or you would need to code a separate iterator for the data. The simpler option in my opinion would be to just use a redundant data control, but that's up to you.

Hope this provides some valuable information on an oft overlooked topic. I'm going to continue blogging on items that I come across while creating this sandbox application, but if anyone has any requests for topics feel free to email me at shaun.obrien@oracle.com and I'll see what I can do to whip something up...

Creating and Using LOVs (List of Values) in ADF Rich Client applications.

2010-10-29T19:23:00.000-07:00

This is likely old hat to many of you but I dealt with a misconception on the forums that made me dig back into LOV creation and make sure that I had all my facts straight. As a result, I decided to just make a quick viewlet demonstrating how to create a LOV (List of Values) using ADF and the advantages to doing it ahead of time so that the framework recognizes it while doing its default binding activities. Check it out below:

So as you can see, they can be really helpful when you're dealing with pesky numerically based foreign keys in your data model. As I pointed out in the demo, it's also helpful if you can foresee the need for them ahead of time so you can create them on the relevant view objects before you drop them on the first page their needed on. That way the binding framework can automatically create the control as a LOV-based control instead of the standard input text forcing you to go back and change them once you get around to creating the LOV.

Of course you could do this manually without creating the LOV in the view object as well by dropping the attribute in question from the data control directly as an af:selectonechoice and completing the required information in the wizard similarly to what we did in the video.

Like I said at the end of the video, I'm going to also put together a viewlet showing how to use this same view object to demonstrate the usage of the ADF Search Form to speed the creation of search pages. Look for that in the next few days.

Generating modeled database layout from JDeveloper

2010-10-28T18:09:00.000-07:00

JDeveloper is a fantastic development tool that allows one to model and develop all layers of an application from the data all the way to the user interface and beyond. One of these awesome features is exposed via the database modeler. Here you can lay out everything pertaining to the data structure of your application prior to creating that structure in a database before actually generating it saving you the headache of repeatedly creating new DDL to make tweaks as you get it just right. Once you've done that you can then go on to generate the default data services that will fulfill the object side of the object-relational bridge of your application right from there as well!

In the database modeler you have options for everything you could think of: tables, views (materialized or not), constraints, keys, custom types, procedures, sequences, you name it. What was funny was I had one of those moments the other day when generating a data structure for a test application I have been working on that prompted my posting.

So anyway, I had modeled out my data structure, had my database connection set up and was ready to generate the modeled structure so I could begin working on creating my business components.

So here you can see the context menu used. I select what I want to create (in this case Ctrl-A for everything), and then right-click on the diagram selecting in the context menu: Synchronize with Database->Generate To->[database connection name].

I then jump midway into the generation wizard since I've already selected my source, target, and objects. I selected to create my objects (option of create, replace, and alter), opted not to create a script, and just told the wizard to finish. And, voila! Once I opened up the database navigator, there were my tables, all set up and ready to go for me. But here was the catch.

When you follow the steps I've just shown you, it creates the physical structure you designed but nothing else.

So for example, if you take a look here at one of the tables I created you will note that the primary key of the table, ID, is a sequence generated primary key that is populated by a BEFORE INSERT trigger. When I went to test data input with my newly created ADF business components I began getting errors because these weren't present. Luckily this was a simple problem to resolve.

All I had to do was to slide back over to my application navigator, highlight the sequences and triggers that I wanted (Ctrl-clicking my way down the list), and then right-click on them and select Generate To->[database connection name].

This then created the necessary sequences and triggers for me and life was grand. A simple thing, but something that was obviously easy to overlook even after doing it so many times. Luckily since I was using JDev I was able to identify, resolve, and verify my fix in less time than it took me to write this post!

Translating Display Values in ADF Rich Client LOVs

2010-10-28T11:10:00.000-07:00

So I was working on a sample app I've been developing and came across an issue with getting a LOV to operate like I had expected it to. So, here is the db diagram of the tables involved. I have the standard ADF BC objects associated with this where I have the type table describing the various named types associated with the numerical id that is held in the TYPE_ID on the main component. So, on the MoveView I went ahead and created an LOV which defines the expected mapping of the ids of the TYPE_ID to the names described on the TYPE table.

So here you see the configuration of the LOV on the MoveView. Now, since the default UI hint is set as a choice list, if I just drop the view on a page it renders this by default as a selectOneChoice tag which is fine. However, if I go ahead and drop the attribute type_id directly from the data control palette I'm prompted with two options from the LOV context menu of ADF LOV Input or ADF LOV Choice List. The problem was introduced when I selected the ADF LOV Choice List. This creates as the rendering tag an "Input Combobox List of Values" which is bound to the LOV model as expected.

So here you can see the different renderings of those controls, both based on the LOV model. The problem I ran into with the control created by dragging the attribute directly from the data control palette is obvious. It lists the type names as desired instead of the type_id which is the actual table data, but once selected, the value that shows up in the collapsed control is the numerical backing value which isn't what I wanted. Thanks to Shays help we were able to come up with a simple (if perhaps not the ideal) workaround. We edited the MoveView, adding the Type table as a contributing entity and then added the name and id fields from the Type table as attributes of the MoveView. We then created a LOV definition on the newly included Name attribute.

So nothing really astonishing in creating this LOV. We then went and dropped the name attribute from the datacontrol palette to the page and dropped it as the aforementioned: "List of Values -> ADF LOV Choice List" which creates the InputComboboxListOfValues we saw before. We then went back into view object editor for the MoveView and made the TypeId attribute dependent on the Name attribute we just brought in from the Type entity. By doing this, when the Name attribute gets updated, the associated Type value will be applied. To tie this all together in the UI, we added the Name LOV control as a PartialTrigger on the TypeId control so that when we updated the Name, the TypeId control would also refresh with the appropriate data. This was mostly done for testing purposes as the Name control that we were creating was there to replace the need for the TypeId based control but we wanted to see that the associated TypeId value was indeed being set when the Name control was used. In the tests it worked perfectly! Thanks to Shay for his assistance getting this worked out.

New Harware on the way!

2010-05-29T09:28:00.000-07:00

For those of you who have followed my blog regularly, you know that I have always been into working with new and exciting hardware and seeing what I can do with it utilizing the Oracle product stack. From my first simple web server installation to host our first web site, to the full sized rack packed with enterprise hardware (SUN E450s, E420s, dell blades, load balancer, etc).

Well, I've moved in a new direction. Short of getting Oracle to lend me an Exadata machine I don't think I can go much further in the "big iron" direction, so interestingly I've been pointed in the "portable power" direction. I'm looking for the most power I can pack in a small package.

So, after reading through a bunch of reviews I settled on a boutique hardware builder named "Maingear" located out of New Jersey. Going on their site reminded me of any of the major hardware organizations with one exception, instead of having a never-ending list of different chassis selections, they focused on a select list of machines, and when it came to component selection, even the least expensive machines utilized name brand components (Intel, AMD, ATI, etc).

I ended up selecting their x-cube chassis as we are looking for portable power, this is an interesting small form factor chassis but I ended up being able to load it with components that would normally be in a full sized chassis. I had the option of loading it with 16gb of ram, the Intel i7 quad-core processors, dual 2tb drives in a RAID configuration, a bevy of video cards, and a lovely 1KW power supply to make sure all these components have the juice they need.

After I made the heart-wrenching decisions on what to take and what to cut, I placed my order. Usually, that would be where most new machine experiences would stop until it arrived, but Maingear has been unreal with their customer support. I have actually been able to speak with the person that is going to be building my machine! On top of that, I have been in a bit of a time crunch and their customer service has been something that I can't even describe.

As a quote from one of my email exchanges with a Maingear team member reads: "As a smaller company, we still have that “passion” for perfection, competitive spirit and belief in customer satisfaction".

If the machine itself gets half the attention that I have gotten as the customer, I can't wait to open it up and see what it can do when I load the Fusion stack on it.

Stay Tuned!

ADF Library vs Normal Jar?

2010-05-26T12:53:00.000-07:00

Quick little link to another blog entry talking about the simple difference between an ADF Library jar and a normal Java jar file.

http://vtkrishn.wordpress.com/2010/05/04/how-normal-jar-library-is-different-from-adf-library/

Enjoy!
-Shaun

Oracle Iron Man 2 Promo video

2010-04-06T18:37:00.000-07:00

Relaxing after presenting the Orange County OTN Developers Day session and saw this come on TV. First time I've seen an Oracle commercial on TV even if it is tied to the upcoming Iron Man movie (which itself looks mighty cool)...

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1640183659?bctid=73931620001

Nothing like being on the other side of the table...

2010-03-17T15:01:00.000-07:00

So anyway, I became aware today that the latest version of FireFox (3.6) which is being pushed via FF's auto-update mechanism right now is known to break drag-and-drop functionality in ADF Faces 11g. This is due to the total removal (without a deprecation phase first) of an API which the FF developers didn't like but ADF Faces and Trinidad relied on.

Development has fixed the problem we'll just need to wait on a decision on method of delivery (one-off, next patchset, etc). There are several announcements regarding this on other Oracle controlled sites (OTN, et al.)

Upcoming Oracle Events

2010-03-15T10:08:00.000-07:00

Just finishing up travel plans for upcoming events. I'll be presenting at the OTN Developer Days in Irvine, CA on the 6th of April, information can be found here for the Irvine event and others. Also will be at Collaborate 2010 in Las Vegas from April 18th to the 22nd, information on that can be found here.

On the materials front, I just completed the inaugural session for the new "ADF Insider" series. In this series of extended web sessions (avg 30mins - 1hr long) the ADF expert team, and potentially some recognized industry experts will provide details on some of the more advanced topics surrounding implementing utilizing the Oracle Application Development Framework. My desire with this project is to have a series of sessions that go a step further in providing information not addressed in existing documentation.

In this spirit, the first session covers how to integrate ADF with a SOA environment. Included in this are multiple hands-on demos covering how to expose ADF business components into the SCA, consuming SOA artifacts (webservices/composites) into an ADF web application, and finally how to create a custom "human task" (from the Oracle SOA Suite) activity interface.

You can find a link to the session here.

Fear the code ninja!!

2010-02-09T10:31:00.000-08:00

Had this passed on to me by a colleague, absolutely hilarious even if it is a less-then-veiled promo for ADF...

Enter the Code Ninja!

Please make sure that the annotations are valid.

2010-02-04T15:31:00.000-08:00

Interesting issue I came across today. Was providing support for a deployment that was going difficultly. Beyond the issues of getting the configuration repaired so the ADF Runtime installer could operate properly, when trying to deploy the application they wanted to put on the server we received the following:

"There was a failure when processing annotations for application [Webapp name redacted]. Please make sure that the annotations are valid. The error is oracle.adf.view.faces.webapp.ResourceServlet"

Interesting error, and after confirming that the ADF Runtime did indeed install correctly, I had to check some of my own developed applications to confirm my suspicion. The resource servlet utilized by ADF 11g is "org.apache.myfaces.trinidad.webapp.ResourceServlet", it is no longer the Oracle labeled one, (which makes sense since we donated the Trinidad libraries). Apparently, this must have been a migrated application that failed to update this particular entry and was utilizing old libraries in development...

C'est la vie!

Oracle plans to continue support for SUN development products

2010-02-01T12:50:00.000-08:00

For those of you that missed the webcast last Wednesday (1/27) Oracle made several key announcements regarding the future of SUN products now that they're under the control of Oracle. Of particular interest were comments on the future of the Netbeans IDE and the Glassfish App Server.

Oracle has reiterated it's commitment to the open-source community and plans to continue support of the Netbeans IDE as a targeted open-source IDE supporting all of the Java SE/EE/TV/Mobile/FX platforms and technologies, including the Glassfish application server. Netbeans will join the suite of Oracle development tools including the award winning JDeveloper, and the Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse becoming yet another option in the strategy of "Productivity with Choice".

Obviously at this point, JDeveloper is and will continue to be the choice for Oracle based development but it will be interesting to see to what extent the Netbeans IDE receives tooling to support core technologies like the Oracle Application Development Framework as well as what key features from Netbeans find their way into JDeveloper.

As for Glassfish, I would predict to see increased support for the container as a spot solution for departmental deployments similar in nature to the positioning of MySQL and potentially as an alternative for testing server deployments in lieu of utilizing full blown Weblogic installations all over the place.

For those of you asking about kenai.com there is really not much more information available other than that which is posted on the kenai site. The site, along with Netbeans integration are going to be discontinued for public-facing use and brought in-house to continue to be used and evaluated.

For recaps of key subjects, feel free to review the webcasts page on the Oracle site at: Oracle/Sun Webcasts.

Larry Ellison to Unveil Oracle + Sun Strategy

2010-01-21T09:15:00.001-08:00

Okay, I've been somewhat lax in getting new posts up for quite some time (I apologize) but plan to be better about it in the future. With the significant items coming up both at the office and personally, and then the holidays, my blogging was one of the casualties.

In any case, one of the things I've been getting bombarded with is questions regarding the proposed Sun acquisition by Oracle and what it's going to mean for both companies and their aligning products and efforts. Obviously I've been unable to comment on these, but it appears that time is coming to an end. Next week (Jan 27) Larry Ellison, along with executives from both organizations will be hosting a live event (which will be webcast) to unveil the details behind the planned acquisition.

This will be of great interest to anyone invested in either of the companies products, more details can be found here.

Cheers!

Larry Ellison Comments on Sun Acquisition

2009-05-12T09:24:00.000-07:00

Well, obviously we're still under gag orders regarding the acquisition. However, there is nothing that prevents me from pointing out a transcript on the open web of a Reuters interview with Larry Ellison regarding it. I read through it and it answers a lot of the questions I've been getting regarding the future of both companies. Find it here:

Interview

ta!

EMEA Partner Training - Dusseldorf Germany

2009-03-12T10:26:00.000-07:00

Well I just got back from presenting a week long blast of JDeveloper + ADF for European partners in Dusseldorf, Germany. It was my first time in Germany and while cold, it was quite interesting. At least the food was good, mostly meat and potatoes and lots of it fried. Yummy.

The training went well, the attendees seemed very interested in the material and we had a wide enough range of topics that everyone got something out of it. The newly initiated got the high level details and those that had been using the suite for a few versions got a deep dive on the new features (task flows, libraries, the ADF controller, phase listeners, etc).

I'm very pleased to be involved in this aspect of the product. When I was in consulting the biggest hurdle I had with getting clients to buy in on the Oracle development stack was the learning curve. With this week long event, people are introduced to the framework and the hands-on materials give them enough exposure to actually jump right into development when they leave.

Back home it is the usual, supporting key adopters, and our internal development. I just completed a paper for ODTUG on JDeveloper 11g and the integrated WebLogic container. I think it is going to be published in May for the conference. I've been doing a lot more writing lately and thoroughly enjoy it as well. At some point I'm going to have to begin publishing some of those materials online as well. When I do that I'll link them in through here.

Preparations for Oracle Open World have already begun. If you're utilizing Oracle technology that is the one conference to be sure you don't miss.

Well, back to the mill stone...

-Shaun

Integrating Remote Task Flows

2009-02-23T11:05:00.000-08:00

It's been an interesting morning. I had an issue with internal development where they had a task flow and on one of the pages it had a region that contained a reference to a remote task flow as well (running in a separate container). They wanted to have the local task flow to have access to the remote task flows page flow scope (a page flow specific memory context).

My solution to this was to either bring the task flow local by including it as an ADF library, or to utilize the in/out parameters to a task flow to return the values they were particularly interested in from the remote task flow. I spoke with Duncan Mills to validate my solution and he seemed interested in putting a requirement into the framework where we could have real time contextual access to the remote resources scope. This would involve putting a queuing mechanism in place to handle the transfer of events/requests between the containers. Coherence perhaps?

I'll keep you informed!

-Shaun

Oracle Developer Days Landing Page

2009-02-19T16:47:00.000-08:00

I promised to post the URL to the landing page for the Developer Days conferences, so here it is!

http://www.oracle.com/technology/events/otn-developer-day/index.html

Check it out and sign-up today! And if you happen to know of a user group that is local to one of the dates feel free to pass the information on to them so they can share it with the rest of the members in the group.

If there are any questions concerning the conferences, or how to sign up, etc; feel free to email me at: shaun.obrien@oracle.com and I'll see what I can do to help out.

-Shaun

2009-01-29T11:00:00.001-08:00

Cool camtasia demo on Shays Blog. Good details if you are interested in how to do PPR in ADF.

http://blogs.oracle.com/shay/2009/01/whenvalidateitem_trigger_in_ad.html

Going to be busy most of today lecturing to a packed house on the next release of JDeveloper which has WLS as the integrated server as well as a multitude of additions. I would guess there are somewhere on the order of 300+ people in the room and it's getting quite hot (we're on a break right now). I'll post more later on how it goes (so far so good).

-Shaun

Always something new...

2009-01-28T09:29:00.000-08:00

So of course we're working on new versions of JDeveloper pretty much all the time but it amazes me the amount of scrutiny the releases have been receiving lately. I've already mentioned the fact that they are getting uptaken by internal developers but I sat in a meeting yesterday with the QA team and found out that in addition to the internal development efforts that QA has been building an app that takes the major points of pain from the internal development efforts, as well as our early adopters and blends them into a test application.

As they went through page after page, I kept nodding my head going "yeah, that is/was an issue" and at several points they indicated that they had logged bugs and would be able to verify appropriate functionality as it passed through QA.

Makes me feel good to know that our product is getting this kind of attention, and I sleep easier knowing the fact that when it rolls out the door that any issue brought up will have adequate attention to not be present.

-Shaun

Oracle Developer Days

2009-01-22T17:26:00.000-08:00

There are still a great number of Oracle Developer Days coming up in various towns across the US. I'll be doing the one in Salt Lake City on April 14th. Terrific training and hands-on labs help make sure that a superior level of understanding of the framework is achieved than could ever be hoped for from just a regular presentation.

The remaining upcoming dates / locations are as follows:

26-Feb: New York City
03-Mar: Dallas
10-Mar: Saint Louis
17-Mar: Reston
31-Mar: Passadena
14-Apr: Salt Lake
16-Apr: Boston

I don't have a URL for the landing page for these handy but when I do, I'll post it!

-Shaun

2009-01-22T10:35:00.001-08:00

Tip of the day: Don't perform a version migration and refactoring on your application at the same time...

WLS Architectures

2009-01-21T12:49:00.000-08:00

Was having an interesting discussion this morning regarding WLS architectures. The discussion centered around the notion of if one should use multiple WLS installations (ie: separate domain/server for each) to manage a project that has the need to deploy different apps to different containers. Or to use a single domain installation with multiple managed servers under that domain.

Either way it should be a non-issue for JDeveloper to manage this as you can create multiple integrated server references by using the tools | preferences | run selection and then selecting "Edit Server Instances" and therein register each of the individual "integrated" servers. You can then through the application properties choose which server the application is bound to. You can even have JDev manage the lifecycle for these additional integrated servers via a checkbox when registering the servers with JDev.

Of course the developers wouldn't make it that easy as they're also requiring separate domain templates to be utilized...

All very interesting.