Retrieving the task flow definition programmatically using MetadataService

Task flow definition in JDeveloper is done through the declarative support provided by the IDE. This includes defining the task flow activities and their relevant control flow cases by dragging-and-dropping task flow components from the Component Palette to the Diagram tab and adjusting their properties through the Property Inspector, defining managed beans in the Overview tab, and so on. JDeveloper saves the task flow definition metadata in an XML document, which is accessible in JDeveloper anytime you click on the Source tab. The task flow definition metadata is available programmatically at runtime through the oracle.adf.controller.metadata.MetadataService object by calling getTaskFlowDefinition(). This API is public since the release of JDeveloper version 11.1.2.

In this recipe, we will show how to get the task flow definition metadata by implementing the following use case. For each task flow in our ADF application...