Oracle E-Business Suite R12 Integration and OA Framework Development and Extension Cookbook: A practical step-by-step guide to develop end-to-end extensions to Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12, with detailed illustrations and explanations

In this chapter, we will be looking at creating OA Framework pages. We will first look at the architecture of OA Framework pages, as this is important to understand before we start any development. Then, we will go through the process of setting up our development environment and what we will need to do to get up and running. We will then create our first page. We will create the components that we need to develop our first page. The working examples will provide a good understanding of how a page is constructed, and we will discuss various points throughout the chapter that are important to gain a sound understanding of the concepts required to start building your own pages.

At the end of the chapter, readers will have an understanding of the components required to develop and test an OA Framework page.

Oracle Applications Framework (OAF) has been around for a number of years now. It was quite a big shift for Oracle with the core applications in EBS being developed in Oracle Forms. However, with the advent of Java and its utilization in web-based applications, which provided a flexible UI console and a much faster processing speed, Oracle decided to make the move from the popular and stable Oracle Forms to OAF.

Initially, the first module to be completely built using OAF within EBS was Oracle HRMS - Self Service. It was followed by other products and modules, such as iProcurement, iSupport, iStore, iRecruitement, iExpenses, and iSupplier to name a few.

OA Framework was introduced by Oracle's Applications Technology Group (ATG). They developed a framework called Oracle Applications Framework, which was based on Java 2 Platform: Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and Model View Controller (MVC) architecture. To develop OA pages, we require:

Create the database objects for this chapter before you start, by using a script provided called 7126_02_01.sh.

Now that we understand the basics regarding the architecture of OA Framework, we are going to get started with our development environment. We will be preparing our development environment ready to create our OA Framework pages. We will perform the following tasks to install the correct IDE and connect to an EBS database instance.

The following environment variables should be set for JDeveloper. JDEV_USER_HOME is mandatory and needs to be set before launching JDeveloper.

We will now transfer the database connection file (DBC) from the application server of our EBS environment. We will transfer this to our local directory so that we can create database connections for JDeveloper so that we can run our OAF pages locally during development.

We are now going to create a shortcut to the JDeveloper executable and put it on our desktop. For the purposes of the book, it is assumed that we are developing using a Windows operating system and therefore, we will create a shortcut to jdevw.exe, as this is the executable we use on Windows. On other operating systems, we would use the jdev.exe executable.

We are now going to log in to EBS and create a user we will be using to develop our OA Framework pages. We will also assign responsibilities to the user so that we can test our connections and access the Oracle tutorials if required.

We are now going to create a database connection to our EBS environment. We always connect using the apps user, so you will need the <apps password> to complete this task.

OC4J stands for Oracle AS Containers for Java EE. It is essentially a lighter version of the Oracle Application Server, and it allows us to run our OAF pages locally on our PC. We will now configure our OC4J settings and set the runtime properties of each of our tutorial projects.

We will now test that we can run a tutorial OA Framework page from within JDeveloper.

Okay, now that we have set up our development environment, we are ready to create our first project. We will perform the following tasks to create a project and set up our runtime parameters for the project:

In the next couple of recipes, we will be creating a search screen. The search screen will be based upon a view, but we will not create an entity object. If we are not performing database transactions, we do not need to create an entity object, although we will do that later in the chapter. We will be creating our application module to search for employees. Therefore, we need to create an application module and view object, and link them together. We will then test that we can return records from EBS using the Oracle Business Component Browser. We will test the configuration before we start creating the user interface in the next recipe. It is really important for us to check that we have successfully set up our application module before we go on to create the user interface. To do this, we will perform the following tasks:

Now that we have created our application module and successfully tested it, we will go on to create our user interface. We will create a page that allows us to query data based upon the attributes in our application module. The page we create will look as follows at the end of this recipe:

To achieve this we will perform the following tasks: