Developing RIA Web Applications with Oracle ADF

Purpose

This tutorial shows you how to build a rich Internet application that interacts with a database. You'll be using Oracle JDeveloper 11g and the ADF framework to build the application, and in the process you'll work with Oracle ADF Business Components, Oracle ADF Faces Rich Client Components and Oracle ADF Task Flows.

Time to Complete

Approximately 2 hours

Topics

The tutorial covers the following topics:

	Overview
	Scenario
	Prerequisites
	Create a New Fusion Application and Business Components
	Refine your Business Components
	Create JSF Web Pages
	Bind Data Controls to your JSF Page
	Add More Complex Business Services
	Create a Page Flow
	Use ADF Faces Framework Features
	Create Read Only Business Services, Page Fragments and Regions
	Summary

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Overview

This tutorial takes you through a simple scenario of building a rich internet application that provides a user interface to access database tables. You'll be using Oracle JDeveloper 11g and Oracle ADF 11g to create a complete application including business services, user interface and page flows.

The focus of this tutorial is to illustrate the visual and declarative approach that Oracle ADF provides for Java EE application development. While working through the tutorial notice how ADF saves you from writing low level and speeds up your development process.

1.	In the Applications Navigator, click New Application. Another option is to use the File->New... menu option to create a new application.
2.	In the Create Application dialog box, specify the Application Name to be HRSystem. Notice that the directory changes to match the new name. You can change the C:\JDeveloper\mywork part of the path if you rather your files will be created in another location. In the Application Package Prefix field set the value to be demo. In the Application Templates choose the Fusion Web Application (ADF) and click Finish.
3.	In the Application Navigator you'll see two new projects now, one called Model and the other called ViewController. Click the Model project and then right click and choose New... you can also click Ctrl+N.
4.	In the New Gallery dialog locate the Business Tier node and click the ADF Business Components sub node. Choose the first option from the right Business Components From Tables and click the OK button. This option allows you to create components based on existing tables in your database.

1.	In the Application Navigator locate the Employees1 entity object and double click it to open it for editing.
2.	In the Employees1.xml window, click the Attributes node and locate the Salary attribute, and click it. Scroll down in the page to the validation section and click the Add icon to add a new Validation rule.
3.	In the Add Validation Rule dialog choose Range from the Rule Type drop down list. Note the various other types of rules you can define here. In the Operator drop down keep the Between value, and type 0 for the minimum value and 99000 for the maximum value fields.
4.	Click the Failure Handling tab to define an error message that will appear when the validation fails. In the Message Text field type an error message like "Salary out of range 0 to 99,000", and click the OK button.
5.	Next we'll add a default value to the hired date field - so when we create a new employee we'll have today's date as the default value. Back in the Employees1.xml window, locate the HireDate attribute, and click it. If not already there, bring up the properties window using CTRL+Shift+I. In the Value section locate the Default Value Type property and choose Expression, then set the Default Value property to adf.currentDate. This will make sure the default value for a new record is set to today's date.
6.	You can also specify UI Hints for attribute to control how they will display by default in the forms and pages that will use them. In our case we'll add a default format mask for the Hired date field you can also specify labels and tooltip helps here. In the UI Hints section of the property inspector locate the Format Type property and select Simple Date. Locate the Format property and type MM/dd/yyyy - note that upper-case lower case usage matters here.
7.	You can now run the Application Module Tester again (right click Run on the AppModule) to check the new validation, default value for new record and UI hint you added. You can also create a new record by pressing the insert record button and see the default value you defined appear for the HireDate field. Click the Save All icon on the JDeveloper menu bar, or select File \| Save All from the menu.

1.	We'll start by creating a new Web page. Right-click the ViewController project node in the Application Navigator, and select New....
2.	In the New Gallery window, navigate to the Web Tier and JSF node, and choose the JSF Page option. Click the OK button.
3.	In the Create JSF Page dialog box, rename the page to DeptEmpPage.jspx, in the Page Template drop down box select Oracle Three Column Layout, and make sure the Create as XML Document is checked. Click the OK button.
4.	Your page will be opened in the visual design view. The template has three columns in it, since we only need two in our page, we'll delete the third one. Place your cursor in the right-most section called end and right click to choose delete. Note - to simplify working with the visual editor area, you can change the resolution defined in the drop down box at the top of the visual editor from "Full Screen Size" to your actual screen resolution - this will allow you to scroll the page in the editor.
5.	Now we are going to add some layout components to our page. In the component palette window expand the Layout accordion and click and drag the Panel Accordion component into the Start area of your page.
6.	Click the ShowDetails1 accordion that was created and in the Property Inspector change its Text property to Departments.
7.	Right click the new Departments accordion and choose Insert After Show Details Item - Departments -> Show Detail Item. This adds one more accordion to your page. Change its Text property to More Info. This was another way to add components to a page using context menus directly inside the Design view.
8.	From the Layout components, click and drag a Panel Splitter component into the Center area of your page.
9.	In the Property Inspector change the Orientation property of the new splitter to be Vertical.
10.	From the Layout components, click and drag a Panel Collection component into the first area at the top of your splitter on your page.
11.	From the Layout components, click and drag a Panel Tab component into the second area at the bottom of your splitter on your page.
12.	Your page should look like the image below. Click the Save All icon on the JDeveloper menu bar to save your work.

1.	In the Application Navigator expand the Data Controls accordion, and in it expand the AppModuleDataControl to expose the business services you defined in the first part of this lab.
2.	Drag the Departments1View1 data control into the Departments accordion in your JSF page. When prompted to choose a component to Create choose Forms->ADF Read-Only Form.
3.	In the Edit Form fields dialog, check the Include Navigation Controls check box and click the OK button. Click OK.
4.	In the Data Controls accordion expand the Departments1View1 control to expose the fields it contains as well as the related Employees1View3 control for the employees in each department. Note that these are the detail employees for the master departments - they are linked and therefore the employees you'll see in this view object will be the ones working in a specific department you are looking at.
5.	Drag the Employees1View3 data control into the Panel Collection on the top right side of your JSF page. When prompted to choose a component to Create choose Tables->ADF Read-Only Table.
6.	In the Edit Table Columns dialog, check the three check boxes for Row Selection, Sorting and Filtering. and click the OK button.
7.	Drag the Employees1View3 data control again but this time into the Tab on the bottom right side of your JSF page. When prompted to choose a component to Create choose Form->ADF Form.
8.	In the Edit Form Fields dialog, check the check boxes for Include Submit Button. Using your mouse and the Shift button select the bottom three fields from the list CommissionPCT, ManagerId, DepartmentID and delete them by pressing the Red X button at the top right. Then click the OK button.
9.	Your JSP should look like this:
10.	Click the Save All icon on the JDeveloper menu bar to save your work, and then Right Click in your page and choose Run. This will compile your project, build it, and launch the integrated WebLogic Server to run it. Then a Web browser will open up and will display your page. You can follow the progress of these steps in the log window in JDeveloper.
10.	Once your page appears in your browser, using the splitter resize the page area to display the data of the department. Then use the Next button to scroll through the departments. Notice that the data for the employees changes accordingly in the table and the Form beneath it.
11.	Try to update the HireDate field for one of the employees with an invalid date such as 11/11/123 and notice the error message when you try to leave the field. Use the Clock Icon next to the field to bring up a pop-up Calendar and choose a valid date.
12.	Update the Salary field to a value that will break the validation you created before such as -9 and click the Submit button to get the error message you created.
13.	Browse to department 50 and notice that you can now scroll the data in the employees table. Click on one of the columns in the table to sort the data in the table.
14.	Click a column heading in the table and drag it to reposition the column in the table. The new column order looks like the following:
15.	In the Filter field above the First Name column type B% and hit Enter to filter the table to show only employees whose name begins with B.
16.	Play with the other menu and buttons of the table to see additional functionality. Once you are done, close the browser and return to JDeveloper.
17.	Next we'll change the table of employees on our page to add the ability to do column selection. Back in JDeveloper select the Employees Table in the JSF page design editor (click the empty space below the lines) or in the structure pane. Set the Column Selection Property of the table to Single
18.	Next we'll add a graph representation of the data to our page - this is done using the ADF Data Visualization set of JSF components. In the Design Editor click the More Info accordion to expand it. Then drag the Employees1View3 data control into the More Info accordion. When prompted to choose a component to Create choose Graph.... The graph component is one of the ADF Faces Data Visualization components. The Graph can be displayed as static PNG image or an interactive Flash component. You can control these behaviors through the properties of the graph component.
19.	In the Component Gallery Dialog choose pie from the list of graphs on the left and pie again as a sub type. Then click the OK button.
20.	In the Create Pie Graph dialog choose Salary for the pie list and LastName for the slices. Then click the OK button.
21.	Click the Save All icon on the JDeveloper menu bar to save your work, and run your page again by right clicking inside the page and choosing Run. This time note the additional behaviors for your table that are available once you choose a column - such as freeze and Wrap. Expand the More Info accordion and note the graph and the pop-up it displays when you hover over it with your mouse. When done, close the browser and return to JDeveloper.

1.	In the Application Navigator under the ViewController project locate the file adf-config under the page flows node. Double click it to open it in the editor. This is where we'll be defining navigation in our application.
2.	Drag and drop the DeptEmpPage.jspx file from the application navigator into the empty adf-config diagram.
3.	From the Component Palette drag and drop a View component into the adf-config diagram, and rename it to query. This is going to be a new JSF page that we'll create in a minute.
4.	From the Component Palette choose a Control Flow Case and then click on the DeptEmpPage and drag a line to the query page. Name this line goQuery.
5.	From the Component Palette choose another Control Flow Case and then create an opposite flow from the query page to the DeptEmpPage. Name this flow back
6.	Double click the query view in the diagram to create the new page. Using the Page Template option, select the Oracle Three Column Layout one in the Create JSF page dialog. Click OK.
7.	Expand the Data Controls accordion in the Application Navigator. Locate the EmpDetails1 data control expand it and expand the Named Criteria node under it. Select the All Queriable Attributes and drag it into the center area of the new query.jspx page. (If the EmpDetails1 doesn't show up in the data control palette - right click inside the data control palette and choose the refresh option.) When prompted to choose a component to Create choose Query->ADF Query Panel.
8.	In the Data Controls accordion select the EmpDetails1 data control and drag it into the center area of the page below the query component. When prompted to choose a component to Create choose Form->ADF Form. In the Edit Forms Details, check both the Include Navigation Controls and the Include Submit Button, then click OK.
9.	In the structure pane locate the Submit button, right click it and choose Insert after af:command:Button - Submit -> Button. Using the property inspector change the Text of the new button to be Back and for the Action property select back from the drop down list. (If there is no list available in the action property - code the value back). This will cause the button to perform the navigation you defined in the page flow.
10.	Next we'll add transaction operations to the page to allow you to commit and rollback changes. In the Data Controls Palette expand the application module level Operations node to locate the commit and rollback operations. Drag the Commit operation into the structure pane before the First Button. When prompted for a drop target choose Operations->ADF Button
11.	Repeat the same steps for the Rollback operation.
12.	If you'll maximize the design editor at this stage by double clicking the Query.jspx tab, your page should look like this:
13.	Switch back to editing the DeptEmpPage.jspx by clicking on its tab or opening the file from the Application Navigator. A quick way to navigate to this or any other file is using the global find box at the top right of JDeveloper and typing the file name there, then just click the file name to open it in the editor.
14.	From the Component Palette, choose a Button component and drag it into the Departments accordion between the First and Previous buttons. Alternatively you can right click the First button and choose insert after->button to add the new button. Using the property inspector change the Text of the button to be Query and for the Action property select goQuery from the drop down list. This will cause the button to perform the navigation you defined in the page flow.
15.	Click the Save All icon on the JDeveloper menu bar to save your work, and then right click the DeptEmpPage.jspx page and choose Run.
16.	When the page appears in your browser click the Query button to navigate to your new page.
17.	In the new Query page, click the magnifying glass next to the JobID field to bring up a search form.
18.	Search for Jobs whose jobTitle begins with A%. Choose the Accountant title and click OK. Now click the Search button in the Query page to return the results in the form below.
19.	You can continue playing with the form saving your query criteria, creating more complex queries and updating data for employees. Note how this form displays a view of the data that matches the definition in the view object you created - including information for Department name as well as a list of values for the Job id. You can also make changes to the data and commit and rollback your transaction as needed. Close your browser window.

	Using Partial Page Refresh
	Using Drop Down Menus and Operation Components

1.	Open the query.jspx file in the design editor and locate the Salary field and click it. In the property inspector window set the value of the id property to sal.
2.	Still in the Property Inspector under the Behavior section set the AutoSubmit property to True .
3.	Using the Structure Panel locate the YearlySalary. Another option to get to this field is to double click the query.jspx tab to maximize the window and then locate the field in the design editor. Locate the PartialTriggers property under the Behavior section and click the arrow to its right to choose Edit.
4.	In the Edit Property dialog locate the Salary field and shuttle it to the right using the blue arrow. Click the OK button.
5.	Click the Save All icon on the JDeveloper menu bar to save your work, and Run your page. When the page comes up use the query section to locate employees whose name begin with A%, then update the Salary field for one of them. Notice the immediate change in the YearlySalary field once you leave the Salary field. Close your browser window.

1.	Open the DeptEmpPage.jspx file in the design editor and click inside the menus place holder space in the panel collection surrounding the Employees table. Right click to bring up the context menu and choose Insert Inside Facet - menus and then Menu.
2.	In the Property Inspector set the Text property to My Options.
3.	In the Property Inspector under the Behavior section set the Detachable property to true.
4.	Using the Structure Pane right click the menu component and choose Insert inside af:menu - My Options and then Menu Item. Using the property inspector set the Text property of the new menu item to Export to Excel.
5.	With the new Export to Excel menu item still selected in the structure pane, expand the Operations section of the the ADF Faces components in the component Palette. Locate the Export Collection Action Listener component and click it - or drag it onto the Export to Excel menu option in the structure pane.
6.	In the dialog that pops up click the down arrow next to ExportedId field and choose Edit.
7.	In the Edit Property dialog navigate the page's structure to locate the table in the PanelCollection and click it. Click OK.
8.	From the Type drop down list select excelHTML. Click the OK button.
9.	Let's add another menu option to our menu. In the structure pane right click the Export to Excel menu component and from the context menu choose Insert After af:commandMenuItem - Export to Excel and then Menu Item.
10.	Set the Text property of this new menu option to Printable Page.
11.	From the Operations section of the component palette click the Show Printable Page Behavior to add it to your new menu item. You can also drag and drop it onto the new menu option you created.
12.	Click the Save All icon on the JDeveloper menu bar to save your work, and choose Run.
13.	When the page comes up bring up your menu and detach it.
14.	Then invoke each one of the menu options you created. For example Export to Excel. You need to accept the download of the file in the browser window to be able to access the Excel file.
15.	Try the Printable Page option. The page is ready for printing.
	Close the browser window.

	Query Only Business Service Based on Parameters
	Reusable Task Flows, Page Fragments and Regions

1.	In the Application Navigator locate the demo.model package and right click on it to choose New View Object....
2.	In the Create View Object dialog set the Name property to EmpByEmail and for view type choose the Read Only Access through SQL Query radio button. Click Next.
3.	In step 2 of the Create View Object dialog type the following query select first_name,last_name from employees where email=:p_email The ':' before p_email means that it is a variable that will be passed to the query. Click the Test button to verify your query and then click Next.
4.	In step 3 of the Create View Object dialog, Click the New button to define a new bind variable. Set the Name property to be p_email. In the Control Hints tab set the Label Text to Email.
5.	Click Next a few more times to accept all the defaults, until you get to step 8 of the dialog. Here check the Application Module check box to include your new view in your data model. Click the Finish button.
6.	You can now run the Application Module Tester, when you'll double click the new EmpsByEmail1 view you'll be prompted to insert a value for the parameter. You can insert SKING press OK and get the results for this email address. To try another value click the blue button with the :id icon. Exit the Tester.

1.	First we'll create a new task flow specific for this page. In the Application Navigator locate the ViewController project and right click on it to choose New.... Under the Web Tier -> JSF category choose ADF Task Flow and click OK.
2.	In the Create Task Flow dialog set the File Name property to search-email-flow.xml. Verify that the Create As Bounded Task Flow and Create with Page Fragments options are both checked. Click OK.
3.	In the diagram editor for the new flow you created, drag a View component from the component palette onto the empty and rename it to searchEmail. While we'll only be using a single page in this flow, you can have bounded task flows with multiple pages and still include them in other JSF pages.
4.	Double click the new searchEmail view components to create the page for it. Accept all the defaults in the dialog that appears and make sure the file name is searchEmail.jsff. This will create the page as a page fragment that can be included in other JSF pages. Click OK.
5.	An empty design view of the page will appear. Expand the Data Controls accordion and locate the new view you created. - EmpByEmail1 expand the view and the Operation node underneath it. We are going to use the ExecuteWithParams operation to execute the query for this view passing to it the needed parameter.
6.	Drag the ExecuteWithParams operation to your new page, when prompted to choose to choose a drop option choose Parameters->ADF Parameter Form.... Accept the defaults presented in the Edit Form Fields dialog and click OK. In the Edit Form Fields dialog click OK to accept default values.
7.	In the design editor for the page click the ExecuteWithParams button and use the property inspector to change the Text property to Find Details.
8.	From the Data Controls accordion, drag the EmpByEmails1 view onto the page beneath the button. When prompted to choose a drop option choose From->ADF Read Only Form.... Accept the defaults presented in the Edit Form Fields dialog and click OK.
9.	Now that our new bounded task flow includes a page fragment, we'll include the complete bounded task flow inside another JSF page. In the Application Navigator locate the DeptEmpPage.jspx file and open it in the visual design editor. From the Component Palette's Layout section drag and drop a Separator component into the left accordion in the DeptEmpPage.jspx page beneath the Departments form.
10.	Now we'll add the new flow we created as a region to the existing page. From the Application Navigator drag and drop the search-email-flow.xml file into the left accordion in the DeptEmpPage.jspx page beneath the new separator. When prompted for a drop target choose to create a Region. Your page should look like the following:
11.	Save your work by pressing the Save All button and then Run the updated DeptEmpPage.jspx page. In the page that comes up in your browser try the new functionality by entering an email value in the Email field and pressing the Find Details button. The employee details are returned.