Didier's Blog

I got several issues this week that had the same root cause though the symptoms were completely different.

The problem is related to the page encoding of the ADF Faces JSPX.
ADF Faces supports 'utf-8' only.
However, by default, the editor creates the pages with the 'windows-1252' encoding:

This leads to problems like:

• accented characters transformed to code representation during the Submit - see the discussion "Character encoding problem in ADF 11 app" in the OTN Forum
• Error: "The value is not a number" when using groupingUsed="true" with specific locale (French f.ex.)
• ...

To avoid these issues, you can edit your pages and change 'windows-1252' by 'utf-8'.
For the new pages, you can change the default to 'utf-8':

1. select menu "Tools" -> "Preferences..."
2. click "Environment"
3. select "UTF-8" in the "Encoding" list.

The new pages will be created correctly now.
Note that as from JDeveloper 11.1.1.2.0 onwards, JDeveloper will use the encoding 'utf-8' (whatever the default encoding is) when ADF Faces technology is used.

We get a lot of questions about the following warnings displayed when running ADF Faces pages including a DVT graph component:

25-May-2009 3:22:02 PM oracle.adf.share.http.HttpSessionStateManagerImpl putState
WARNING: Transient state added to StateManager. State may not be serialized.
State id: data.view_graph1_pagePageDef.graph1__cubicDefinition
25-May-2009 3:22:03 PM oracle.adf.share.http.HttpSessionStateManagerImpl putState
WARNING: Transient state added to StateManager. State may not be serialized.
State id: data.view_graph1_pagePageDef.graph1__dataModel


We discussed the issue with our development team and here was their feedback:

The Graph puts persistent state objects on the StateManager, these objects are Serializable. In addition the Graph also puts transient state objects on the StateManager, these objects are not Serializable.

Note that Graph does not depend on these transient objects always being available on the StateManager, it only uses them for performance if they are there. These transient objects can be recreated from the persistent objects which will always be available.

In other words, you can ignore this warning.

We get a lot of questions at Oracle Support about the dialogs not opening in a separate, dialog window in JDeveloper 11g.

For example, suppose you specified the following:

faces-config.xml

Note the following properties:
useWindow="true" action="dialog:popup"
that should open the page as a popup dialog.

This worked correctly in JDeveloper 10g
In JDeveloper 11g however, it opens popup.jspx in the same browser window as yourMainPage.jspx, and not in a dialog window.

The reason is that you used faces-config.xml to configure your navigation rule, instead of adfc-config.xml.
From the "Oracle® Fusion Middleware Fusion Developer's Guide for Oracle Application Development Framework",
Chapter 17 Creating Complex Task Flows,
topic "17.7 Running an ADF Bounded Task Flow as a Modal Dialog"

If your application uses ADF Controller features (for example, ADF task flows), specifying dialog: syntax in navigation rules within faces-config.xml is not supported.
However, you can use the dialog: syntax in the control flow rules that you specify in the adfc-config.xml file.

So you should specify the flow in adfc-config.xml:

adfc-config.xml

See also "A.3 Configuration in faces-config.xml"
Typically, you would configure the following in then faces-config.xml file:

Note:
If your application uses the ADF Controller, these items are configured in the adfc-config.xml file. For more information, see the "Getting Started With Task Flows" chapter of the Oracle Fusion Middleware Fusion Developer's Guide for Oracle Application Development Framework.

Problem

.AFButtonServerText:alias
{
    color:black;
    background-color: #D2DEED;
    font-weight:bold;
    font-family: Arial, Helvetica;
    font-size: 11px;
}

.AFButtonServerTextDisabled:alias
{
    color:#AAAAAA;
    font-family:Arial, Helvetica;
    font-size: 11px;
    font-weight: normal;
}

   -Djava.awt.headless=true

Cause

Solution

sansserif.plain.latin-1=-b&h-lucidasans-medium-r-normal-sans-*-%d-*-*-p-*-iso8859-1

As you can read in the "Oracle JDeveloper 10.1.3.3.0 Installation Guide", the browsers that are supported in the current release of JDeveloper are:

• IE 5.5
• IE 6.0 (XP only)
• Netscape 7.2
• Mozilla 1.7
• Firefox 1.0.4
• Firefox 1.5
• Firefox 2.0
• Safari 2.0
  

This question comes regularly at Oracle Support and in the forums.
You want to show (render) and hide an ADF Faces component dynamically on your page, depending on the value of another component.

Suppose f.ex. a Radio Group with 2 buttons "Show" and "Hide'.
Clicking "Show" should display a button; it should disappear when clicking "Hide".
For that, you defined a selectOneRadio that saves the values "show" and "hide" in your backing bean, in an attribute "radioBtnValue":

            <af:selectOneRadio label="Show/Hide" id="yourSelectOneRadio"
                               value="#{Backing.radioBtnValue}"
                               autoSubmit="true">
              <af:selectItem label="Show" value="show"/>
              <af:selectItem label="Hide" value="hide"/>
            </af:selectOneRadio>

            <af:commandButton text="Button"
                              rendered="#{Backing.radioBtnValue=='show'}"
                              partialTriggers="yourSelectOneRadio"/>

You cannot use PPR (Partial Page Rendering)
to directly toggle the "rendered" attribute of a component.
You have to wrap
the component (with the rendered attribute) in a parent component and set the
partialTriggers in its parent.
The reason is that only components that
are rendered can react to PPR.

In the example above, you can create a parent with the partialTriggers property, a panelGroup f.ex.:

            <af:panelGroup partialTriggers="yourSelectOneRadio">
                 <af:commandButton text="Button"
                                   rendered="#{Backing.radioBtnValue=='show'}"/>
               </af:panelGroup>

When an event occurs on the selectOneRadio, the parent component will react to PPR.
During the PPR,
the parent component and all its children will be updated.

the rendered property of the button will be evaluated and the button
displayed or hidden accordingly

I added sample 7 to my ADF Sample Applications page.

Symptom

public void yourMethod() {
   System.out.println("Hello World");
}

...
  <executables>
    ...
    <invokeAction Binds="yourMethod" id="executeYourMethodAction"
                  RefreshCondition="${!adfFacesContext.postback}"/>
    ...
  </executables>
  <bindings>
...
  <methodAction id="yourMethod" InstanceName="AppModuleDataControl.dataProvider"
                DataControl="AppModuleDataControl" MethodName="yourMethod"
                RequiresUpdateModel="true" Action="999"
                IsViewObjectMethod="false"/>
  </bindings>
</pageDefinition>


Hello World
Hello World 


Cause

Solution

When your ADF Faces page includes a component with the property autoSubmit set to true, you get the following error:

1. in the backing bean, add a boolean variable ppr true when a Partial Request occurs:
   

   (...)
   import oracle.adfinternal.view.faces.renderkit.core.xhtml.PartialPageUtils;
   (...)
   private boolean ppr;
   (...)
   public void setPpr(boolean ppr) {
      this.ppr = ppr;
   }
   
   public boolean isPpr() {
      FacesContext fctx = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance();
      return PartialPageUtils.isPartialRequest(fctx);
   }
   (...)
   

   
   
2. use it in the required property of the mandatory field:
   

   <af:inputText ...
                 required="#{! backing_validation.ppr}"
                 immediate="true" ... />
   

   
   

A regular request from former Oracle Forms and Designers developers is how to program lookup fields.
Suppose f.ex. a page displaying an Employee (SCOTT.EMP), including a field Deptno that automatically refreshes a field Dname when updated:

It's already a while I put this sample in my Sample Applications page, but I see I never announced it on my Blog.

I created Sample 5 including a page with a table and an af:tableSelectMany component.
You can select several employees and click the button "Increase Salary":


The salary of the selected and ... lucky ... employees will be increased by 10%:

Jose asks in the OTN Forum how to set the first day of the week in the <af:SelectInputDate> component.
For example, suppose that you set up the preferred language of your Browser to French/Belgium [fr-be].

The calendar will show the following days: dim., lun., mar., mer., jeu., ven., sam. for Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday respectively:


However, in Belgium, as in many other European countries, the first day of the week is the Monday and not the Sunday.
So the calendar should display: lun., mar., mer., jeu., ven., sam., dim.  instead.

Is it possible to change this in ADF Faces ?

Unfortunately, it's not possible in the current release of JDeveloper.
This will be possible from JDeveloper 11 onwards (Enhancement Request 5653036 for those who have access to Metalink), where the chooseDate component will take the locale into account to display dates (and also numbers).
For more information, see "Add support for formatting locale, separate from translation locale".

In a previous post, I blogged about some ADF Faces Pages that didn't render correctly - see "ADF Faces Pages under WEB-INF Directory Do Not Render Correctly in 10.1.3.1".

I also had another customer reporting the problem, though the pages were created outside the WEB-INF directory.
In his case, the Visual Editor was showing a blank page as the following:


To diagnose such issues, you can first launch JDeveloper with the Console window opened, by executing <JDEV_HOME>\jdev\bin\jdev.exe (not jdevW.exe).
Repeat the operation and check if the Console displays a Stack Trace.
Unfortunately, it didn't help in this case.

The next step is to change a preference in JDeveloper:

Select menu Tools -> Preferences...
In the left pane, select JSP and HTML Visual Editor
There select the check box Show Design Time Messages in Log.
This preference controls whether design time errors display in the Log window.
 
Restart JDeveloper and open the page again.
In this case, we got errors in the Log window:

Failed in contextInitialization  : class com.sun.faces.config.ConfigureListener
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/commons/digester/Digester
    at com.sun.faces.config.ConfigureListener.digester(ConfigureListener.java:964)
    at com.sun.faces.config.ConfigureListener.contextInitialized(ConfigureListener.java:270)
    at oracle.jdevimpl.webapp.design.support.http.DesignTimeServletContainerContext.contextInitialized(DesignTimeServletContainerContext.java:978)
    at oracle.jdevimpl.webapp.design.DesignTimeThread.invokeContextInitialized(DesignTimeThread.java:712)
    at oracle.jdevimpl.webapp.design.DesignTimeThread.synchronousUpdate(DesignTimeThread.java:163)
    at oracle.jdevimpl.webapp.design.DesignTimeDocumentContext._init(DesignTimeDocumentContext.java:1477)
    at oracle.jdevimpl.webapp.design.DesignTimeDocumentContext.<init>(DesignTimeDocumentContext.java:247)
    at oracle.jdevimpl.webapp.design.DesignTimeEngine.start(DesignTimeEngine.java:242)
    at oracle.jdevimpl.webapp.editor.jsp.JspEditor.startupDesignTime(JspEditor.java:307)
    (...)

• Common Beanutils 1.6.1
• Common Digester 1.5
• Common Logging 1.0.3
• Common Collections 2.1

1. Double-click your Project to access the Project Properties
2. Select Libraries in the left panel
   
3. click button Add Library...
   
4. select the 4 missing libraries
   
   
5. click OK twice to close the 2 dialogs.
   

Mauro reports the following problem on the OTN Forum:
Running the application from "Introduction to ADF Faces/Trinidad Using JDeveloper" on OTN, migrated from JDeveloper 10.1.3.1.0 to JDeveloper 10.1.3.2.0 fails with the following error:

500 Internal Server Error

java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: oracle.adf.view.faces.context.AdfFacesContextFactory.createContext (Loracle/adf/view/faces/webapp/wrapper/ContextWrapper;Loracle/adf/view/faces/webapp/wrapper/RequestWrapper;)
Loracle/adf/view/faces/context/AdfFacesContext;
    at oracle.adfinternal.view.faces.webapp.AdfFacesFilterHelperImpl.startFilter(AdfFacesFilterHelperImpl.java:112)
    at oracle.adfinternal.view.faces.webapp.AdfFacesFilterImpl.doFilter(AdfFacesFilterImpl.java:111)
    at oracle.adf.view.faces.webapp.AdfFacesFilter.doFilter(AdfFacesFilter.java:87)
    (...)

2 customers asked me this week how to specify a second date pattern for an af:selectInputDate

(...)
<af:selectInputDate value="#{bindings.Hiredate.inputValue}"
                    label="#{bindings.Hiredate.label}"
                    required="#{bindings.Hiredate.mandatory}">
   <af:validator binding="#{bindings.Hiredate.validator}"/>
   <f:convertDateTime pattern="#{bindings.Hiredate.format}"/>
</af:selectInputDate>
(...)

(...)
<af:convertDateTime pattern="#{bindings.Hiredate.format}"
                    secondaryPattern="ddMMyyyy"/>
(...)

A customer contacted me with the following problem:
he created an ADF Faces page where
the end-users can enter a query criterion, say a Department Number, and display
the Employees from this Department in a Read-Only Table.




The application works fine.
However, they reported the following problem:
they can navigate to another Range in the page, to scroll through the employees of the department, as shown in the figure above, where the second Range (record 3) is displayed (I set the RangeSize to 2 in this sample).

Then they query another department, say 20.
Employees from this Department are shown - that's correct.
However, they were expecting the table to show the first employees of the Department 20.
It doesn't: the table Range stayed at the same position as it was before the new query was executed:




To fix this problem, you have to add the following code in your backing bean:

public String resetRange() {
   getEmpTable().setFirst(0);
   return null;
}

<af:commandButton
   text="Query"
   (...)
   action="#{yourBackingBean.resetRange}"/>

I've added example # 3 to illustrate how to use an <af:selectBooleanCheckbox> bound to VARCHAR2 or NUMBER Oracle Database columns.
This is performed by creating a transient attribute of type Boolean and redefining its getter and setter methods to 'translate' the ADF Business Components type Boolean to the 'standard' String or Number types that the Oracle Database "understands".
(Boolean is not a valid type in the Oracle Database).

Some readers of the "Oracle JDeveloper 10g for Forms & PL/SQL Developers" informed me they had some problems with the Hands-on Practice of Chapter 11: Create the Home Page and Menus, section III.
Create a Template.
At page 344, under Add Components to the Template, step 1, after the drag&drop of the PanelPage on the h:form tag, the Visual Editor should normally
display the template page as the following:



This is how the
page displays when doing the practice in JDeveloper 10.1.3.0

However, when using JDeveloper 10.1.3.1 the ADF Faces components do not render correctly:



Closing and reopening JDeveloper as proposed in the NOTE at page 345 doesn't help.

This problem happens for all ADF Faces page you create in WEB-INF directory or in any of its sub-directories, f.ex. ...\WEB-INF\template\
We reported the issue in Bug 5665931 (*) - JSF PAGES CREATED IN SUB-DIRECTORY DON'T RENDER CORRECTLY IN THE VISUAL EDITOR
(*) requires an account on MetaLink.

However, Steve Muench points out that the problem is related to a change in the JavaServer Faces reference implementation version 1.1_02, as documented in the JDeveloper 10.1.3.1.0 Release Notes:

JDeveloper 10.1.3.1 upgrades to the JavaServer Faces reference implementation
version 1.1_02. This maintenance release of the JSF runtime from Sun introduces
a new restriction preventing the processing of any JSF page located in the ./WEB-INF
directory (or subdirectory thereof). If your JSF applications contain pages
in the WEB-INF directory, you will need to move those pages to another directory
under the web root other than WEB-INF for them to function correctly. If your
JSF pages use ADF Model data binding, after moving the JSP/JSPX pages from ./WEB-INF
(or subdirectory) to a new directory under your web root, you will need to reflect
the change in the "path" value inside the <pageMap> section
of your DataBindings.cpx file. For example, if your page previously had a "path"
value of "/WEB-INF/page/Test.jspx" and you moved this Test.jspx page
to ./public_html/page/Test.jspx -- where ./public_html is the HTML root directory
of your view controller project -- then you must edit the value of the path
and change it from "/WEB-INF/page/Test.jspx" to "/page/Test.jspx".

• either use JDeveloper 10.1.3.0
  [it can be downloaded from OTN; ensure you select Oracle  JDeveloper 10g (Version 10.1.3.0, build 3673)]
  
  
• or you can store the template somewhere else than under WEB-INF.
  "The only reason for putting it there is so that it is not directly runnable. You can
  avoid this issue by not deploying the template file if it was elsewhere
  in the directory structure." (Thanks to Duncan Mills for his comment).
  

I already blogged on problems after migration to JDeveloper 10.1.3.1  Production.

Jan Vervecken reports other issues on OTN: "10.1.3.1 : Skip navigation elements to page contents"

The problem

Skip navigation elements to page contents

The Solution

References

• Bug 5616568 - MIGR: "SKIP NAVIGATION ELEMENTS TO PAGE CONTENTS"
• Note 396255.1 - ADF Faces Pages Migrated from JDev 10.1.3.1 Preview Displays Message: "Skip navigation elements to page contents"
  

As explained in my previous post "JDeveloper 10.1.3.1 Production", there are known problems with the migration of ADF Faces applications to JDeveloper 10.1.3.1 Production.

My initial testings were done with a migration from JDeveloper 10.1.3.0 to JDeveloper 10.1.3.1 Production.
The fix was to copy the right version of jsf-impl.jar to your project directory .../WEB-INF/lib

However it appears that the migration from JDeveloper 10.1.3.1 Developer's Preview (Build 3914) shows different symptoms and requires another fix (copy adf-faces-impl.jar).
See the following OTN Forum threads:

• ADF Faces; how to see bug fix in 10.1.3.1 (need to manually copy jars?)
• 10.1.3.1 first crash after migration
• Error after migrating project to production from developers preview
  
• 10.1.3.1 : JSF migration issues : "awijeyek build" versus "sobryan build" (thanks Jan for the detailed description)
  

The <af:resetButton> component: doesn't empty the fields after a Form was submitted.
Instead, it reverts them to their values right after the last Form submission.

If you want to empty the values in the Form elements, you have to use JavaScript.

Suppose a JSF page with a field identified as 'username':

<af:inputText label="Username" (...) id="username"/>

 function resetFields() {
   document.forms[0].elements['username'].value='';  
}

function moreGenericResetFields() {
   for ( i=0; i < document.forms[0].elements.length; i++) {
      if ( ! ( document.forms[0].elements[i].readOnly  || document.forms[0].elements[i].disabled) ) {

         if (( document.forms[0].elements[i].type == 'text' ) || ( document.forms[0].elements[i].type == 'textarea' ) || ( document.forms[0].elements[i].type == 'password' )) {
            document.forms[0].elements[i].value = '';
         }

         if ( document.forms[0].elements[i].type == 'checkbox' ) {
            document.forms[0].elements[i].checked = false;
         }

         if ( document.forms[0].elements[i].type == 'select-one' && ( document.forms[0].elements[i].length != 0 )) {
            document.forms[0].elements[i].options[0].selected = true;
         }

      }
   } 
}

(...)
<afh:head>
  <script src="utils.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
  (...)
</afh:head>
<afh:body>
  (...)
  <af:inputText label="Username" (...) id="username"/>
  (...)
  <af:commandButton text="Reset Via JavaScript" onclick="resetFields()"/>
  (...)
</afh:body>
(...)

Frank explains how to submit a form with the Enter key on his blog.
He works with the standard JSF h:form component and creates JavaScript code to handle the Enter key.

Another solution, that doesn't require Javascript coding, is to use the af:form
It contains a property defaultCommand where you can specify the id
attribute of the command button whose action will be invoked by
default for form submit on hitting ENTER on any of the input fields of
the form.

See the detailed explanation [Here]

We had several requests in Oracle Support this week for an example of browsing and editing/uploading images in a JSF page.
Steve added example # 69 to his samples page.
In his example, the images are saved in a column of type ORDImage (Oracle Intermedia type).

Jonas announced on his Blog today that ADF Faces project (donated to Apache) was renamed Trinidad.

See "Long live Project Trinidad a.k.a ADF Faces!!" for more information.

I have a strange problem from time to time, while working with a JSF page in JDeveloper:
I cannot see the palettes ADF Faces Core and ADF Faces Html from the drop-down list in the Component Palette anymore, and the Faces tags are not displayed correctly in the Visual Editor.

It works fine again after I close and restart JDeveloper.
See this article for more detail.

Warnings are shown in the JDeveloper Log window when running JSF applications:

Target URL -- http://localhost:8988/YourApplication-context-root/faces/YourJSP.jsp
08-Mar-2006 16:19:05 com.sun.faces.config.rules.ConverterRule end
WARNING: [ConverterRule]{faces-config/converter} Merge(javax.faces.Short,null)
(...)
08-Mar-2006 16:19:05 com.sun.faces.config.rules.ConverterRule end
WARNING: [ConverterRule]{faces-config/converter} Merge(javax.faces.Number,null)
2006-03-08 16:19:08.673 NOTIFICATION ADF Faces is running with time-stamp checking enabled. This should not be used in a production environment. See the oracle.adf.view.faces.CHECK_FILE_MODIFICATION property in WEB-INF/web.xml