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Oracle ADF Faces Cookbook
Oracle ADF Faces Cookbook

Oracle ADF Faces Cookbook: Transform the quality of your user interfaces and applications with this fascinating cookbook for Oracle ADF Faces. Over 80 recipes give you an insight into virtually every angle of the framework's potential.

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Oracle ADF Faces Cookbook

Chapter 2. Getting Started with ADF Faces and JDeveloper

This chapter contains the following recipes:

  • Creating an Application Workspace

  • Connecting your application to a database

  • Building Business Service

  • Defining the page flow

  • Creating a View page

  • Adding ADF Faces components to JSF pages

  • Running your first ADF Faces application

Introduction


In today's environment, enterprise applications have become more and more complex; they need the underlying technology to be scalable, distributed, component based, and mission critical.

Designing and developing such enterprise applications means going through hundreds of requirements; failure to meet any of these requirements can lead to the failure of the whole project. However, Oracle ADF comes to the rescue. Oracle ADF is a Java EE framework that inherits Java EE security, robustness, and scalability.

It also adheres to the rapid application development principles in today's agile world. These principles provide the developer with a rich out-of-the-box functionality to focus and give his/her 100 percent to the business logic.

Oracle ADF is an end-to-end framework that follows the Model View Controller (MVC) pattern as illustrated in the following diagram:

Oracle ADF offerings vary between mobile solutions with Oracle ADF Mobile and the Desktop Integration solution, which can...

Creating an Application Workspace


In this recipe, we will get to know a little bit about the JDeveloper IDE and how we can navigate around it; after this, we will start with the first steps of creating our ADF application by creating the ADF Application Workspace.

How to do it…

In order to create the ADF Application Workspace, perform the ensuing steps:

  1. Start JDeveloper; you will find different panes highlighted in the following screenshot:

    One of the main panes is the Application navigator pane (the top-left pane), which displays the application files. If there are no applications (such as the case when you open JDeveloper for the first time), you end up with two links: one for creating a new application and another for opening a pre-existing application.

    The center pane is the main pane, which will be the Start Page when you start JDeveloper.

    The bottom-left pane is the Structure pane, that gives you the structure of the center pane. If a Java class is in the main pane, the structure pane will...

Connecting your application to a database


In this application, we want to display employees' data from the HR schema on a web browser and be able to navigate between different records using buttons that help us go to the first, next, previous, and last records; employees' information should be displayed in a form-based view.

In order to retrieve employees' information, we need to establish a connection with the HR database.

In this recipe, we will use JDeveloper to establish a connection between our new ADF application and the HR schema, which comes by default with the Oracle database.

How to do it…

In order to establish a connection with the HR schema, follow the ensuing steps:

  1. Expand the Connect to a Database checklist item from the checklist and click on the Create a Database Connection button that will open the Create Database Connection dialog.

    Tip

    You can also create a connection by navigating to File | New | From Gallery | General | Connections | Database Connection.

  2. Choose a connection name...

Building Business Service


In this recipe, we are going to build our Business Service Layer, which consists of one entity object based on the EMPLOYEES table, one view object based on the entity object, and one application module to host the latest view object.

Tip

In a real application, it's always a good practice to establish a uniform naming convention for your business components, such as suffixes and package names, which can be found by navigating to Tools | Preferences | ADF Business Components | Object Naming and Packages.

This will be the only recipe that talks about Business Service in brief in this book. If you want to know more about building Business Service, check the official documentation at http://docs.oracle.com/middleware/1212/adf/ADFFD/partpage2.htm#ADFFD20093.

How to do it…

In order to build your Business Service, follow the ensuing steps:

  1. Right-click on the Model project node from the Applications navigator pane and navigate to New | Business Components from tables...; by doing...

Defining the page flow


When we talk about defining the page flow of our application, we talk about it in terms of how pages interact with each other, designing what is the right sequence of pages that the user has to navigate through; also, designing how work units are arranged in pages, and how they can be modularized and communicate with each other as well.

In this recipe, we move from the Business Service layer to the Controller layer. In order to work with page flows, we need to first understand what ADF Task Flow is.

ADF Task Flows provide a modularized approach to define the control flow in an ADF application. So, instead of representing an application as a single large page, you can break it up into a collection of reusable task flows.

Each task flow contains a portion of the application's navigational graph and can be considered as a logical business unit of work.

Each task flow contains one or more nodes that are called activities. An activity node can represent a simple logical operation...

Creating a View page


In this simple recipe, we will create the actual JSF page behind the Employees View activity inside the retrieve-employees-information task flow that was created in the previous recipe.

How to do it…

In order to create the JSF page behind the View activity, follow the ensuing steps:

  1. Open the retrieve-employees-information task flow and then double-click on the employees View activity. A dialog should pop up asking for the filename and the page template for this page and/or Managed Beans for it. For this simple application, we won't create page templates as we will use Oracle Three Column Layout.

  2. Leave the default filename as is.

  3. Choose the Oracle Three-Column layout under Page Layout tab | Reference ADF Page Template. In Chapter 5, Beautifying Application Layout for Great User Experience, we will learn how to create our own rich page template.

  4. Close the pop-up window by clicking on the OK button.

  5. Open the HelloADFFaces Overview tab and check the Design Pages checklist item...

Adding ADF Faces components to JSF pages


Now, for the magic to happen from the Business Service Layer to the view layer, in order to place the data, you can select the data that you want to insert from the Data Control and drag-and-drop it onto our page and choose the format that this page should have. So let's do that.

What we want is to have a form that has all employees' information inside our page.

How to do it…

Let's see how to add ADF Faces components to JSF pages:

  1. Expand HrAppModuleDataControl under Data Controls and drag Employees1 into the white square inside of the employees.jsf page. Remember this is the view object that contains all employees' information, and it's based on the Employees Entity object.

  2. Choose ADF Form... when the drag-and-drop dialog appears as shown in the following screenshot:

    Now, a new dialog pops up asking you what you want to display in your form.

  3. Check the Row Navigation checkbox.

    This will place all navigation buttons such as First, Next, Previous, and Last under...

Running your first ADF Faces application


In this recipe, we will run our application in multiple scenarios by trying the worst scenario first and enhancing it till we reach the best scenario.

How to do it…

To run your first ADF Faces application, perform the following steps:

  1. Locate your task flow retrieve-employees-information and right-click on it.

  2. Click on Run or select it and click on Run (the green arrow icon) on the toolbar, and the page will start appearing.

    Tip

    If this is the first time you run an application in JDeveloper, a pop-up window will ask you to instantiate your first Weblogic instance and will ask you about the password for your weblogic user and port numbers.

If you did everything correctly, you should see a form that you can navigate through with Next, Previous, First, and Last.

However, if you check the URL, it's quite ugly. It's not quite what you have in mind, so how can it be enhanced?

Tip

This method is not recommended and is only used for debugging and testing Page-based...

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What you will learn

  • Understand what Oracle ADF Faces is and what it is used for
  • Explore different approaches to present and search your data
  • Learn about common ADF Faces components
  • Get to know about Oracle ADF Faces layout components and page templates
  • Master ADF Skins with the power of SASS and Compass
  • Learn about different ADF Faces Data Visualization components
  • Handle different components, events, and partial page rendering effectively
  • Learn how to use validators and converters
  • Create reactive applications using different approaches such as Polling, Push, and the WebSocket protocol

Product Details

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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Mar 26, 2014
Length: 358 pages
Edition :
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781849689229
Category :

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Product Details

Publication date : Mar 26, 2014
Length: 358 pages
Edition :
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781849689229
Category :

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Table of Contents

10 Chapters
Building Your ADF Faces Environment From the Ground Up Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Getting Started with ADF Faces and JDeveloper Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Presenting Data Using ADF Faces Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Using Common ADF Faces Components Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Beautifying the Application Layout for Great User Experience Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Enriching User Experience with Visualization Components Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Handling Events and Partial Page Rendering Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Validating and Converting Inputs Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Building Your Application for Reuse Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Scaling your ADF Faces Application Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

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matteo80 Apr 05, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
I find this book extremely well written and structured. It covers all the main ADF Faces components with many examples, covering also very interesting and useful topics that are not very well documented by Oracle, providing simple but effective recipes.Before this book, no one covered is such detail this part of the ADF Framework, so it definitely fills a gap in the market and becomes a must-have in order to master ADF Faces.As an experienced ADF developer, I strongly recommend to buy it, it's really worth it.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Mauro Flores Apr 20, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
If you're looking for a good guide on how to work with ADF Faces (view layer of ADF) this is the best book you can find about it. Usually this topic can be found in a chapter or two in other ADF books what, in my opinion, is not enough for this extensive layer.This book covers from basics to advanced topics and it tries to follow Oracle Best Practices. If you're into ADF this is a book that MUST be part of your library.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
David Geoffrey Willis Jun 11, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
Hi I recently purchase the Oracle ADF Faces Cookbook and I had started working on the first three chapters already. I am not sure is it a bug or something I got lost since I just start learning ADF. Starting on Chapters 3 when you ask to Open the faces-config task flow from the WEB-INF folder and Drag-and drop a view activity inside face-config, but the problem were I never find the View component from the Activity. But one of the early example you had in the page were open the adfc-config.xml and drag-and-drop the View activity and from the adfc-config.xml I can see the View but not from the faces-config.xml. Since most of the exercises were ask to drop the View to the face-config.xml and I can't see it from the activites so can you tell me what wrong?Thanks
Amazon Verified review Amazon
vinaykumar May 13, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
I really enjoyed learning this book. Good of newbie and experienced as well.For readers who starting ADF development.This can be a good read for them.For experienced developer -Good to revise concepts and performance recommendation, MDS are worth reading. This book extremely well written and structured.Book uses schema based on HR schema.While reading , good to test the code in your system.Good work by Amr.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Waslley Souza May 13, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
"Oracle ADF Faces Cookbook" published by Packt Publishing is a guide to learn Oracle ADF Faces. With this book you will learn almost everything about view and controller layers from Oracle ADF and how to use a lot of components. The book is full of good examples and best practises. All chapters are well written and they have links to official document from Oracle.The examples are detailed and easy to perform. A good example described in this book: how to use Task Flow Template to create a crud structure, and reuse it in another Task Flows.I recommend this book for begginers and experienced developers, because it covers from basics to advanced topics and it tries to follow Oracle Best Practices.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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