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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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...