JHeadstart Blog

Oracle JHeadstart 10.1.3.1 is now available for download. All customers that hold a supplement option license can download jhs10.1.3.1.26-install.zip from the Consulting Supplement Option
portal. 

For a point release, JHeadstart 10.1.3.1 includes an impressive list of new features: 

• Generation of Graphs. There is a new item display type 'graph' which allows you to generate BI graphs. The graph type and appearance can be set using the generated BI Graph xml file.
 
• Multi-Select List of Values. The multi-select LOV behavior that was already present in JHeadstart 10.1.2 has been re-added.
 
• Conditional Requery. There is a new group-level property that allows you to specify when an ADFm iterator binding should be requeried. Predefined values are "Always", "When Entering the Page" and "After Commit". You can also define a boolean JSF EL expression that will force a requery when it evaluates to true.
 
• Advanced Search on Detail Tables. You can link an unbound advanced or quick search item to a bind variable by naming the bind variable after the item name, prefixed with the group name. You can use the bind variable in the SQL Query of the underlying ViewObject anyway you want, for example in the where clause of a sub select on a detail table.
 
• Add Row Button. You now have the ability to generate an "Add Row" button in a table. This allows you to create new rows in a table with overflow right or below.
 
• Duplicate Row Button. You have the ability to generate an "Duplicate Row" button in a table. When pressing this button, all values of the currently selected row are copied to a new table row, except for the primary key value(s).
 
• Summary Types in Table. A new item-level checkbox property "Display Summary Type in Table" has been added. You can set the value to"sum", "average" or "count". When set an additional total row is displayed at the bottom of the table, showing the computed summary type of the item for all rows in the data collection.
 
• Row-Specific Dropdown Lists in Table. There is a new domain property "Data Collection Changes By Row" which allows you to generate drop down lists with a different content in each table row. One use case for this is the implementation of cascading dropdown lists, for examplethe managers drop down list only showing managers working in the department of the employee.
 
• Support for multiple "depends on" items. The "Depends on Item(s)" property is now editable, in addition to choosing an itemfrom the dropdown list, you can type in a comma-delimited string of "depends on" item names.
 
• Regions can be made dependent of one or more items. The "Depends on Item(s)" property has been added to Item region, Groupregion and Region Container. This allows you to conditionally render a region based on the value of another item in the group.
 
• Mobile Support. Service-level View Type property is now configurable by the user. For each view type a set of templates and generator resource bundles can be defined in jag-config.xml. A MobilePDA View Type is predefined with dedicated templates and a resource bundle with short labels.
 
• Enhanced NLS Support. The GeneratorText resource bundles used by the Jheadstart Application Generator to generate static texts, basedon the language set in the Application Definition, are now added to the project in the /templates/nls directory. This makes it much easier to changegenerator text entries and to add support for additional languages.
 
• Relative path for templates directory. In the JHeadstart Application Definition Editor, you can specify the template directory relative to the ViewController project root directory.
 
• Item only updateable when not new. A new allowable value of while_not_new has been added to the item updateable property.
 
• Hot-reloading of resource bundles. It is possible to reload changed resource bundles without shutting down your J2EE Application Server (feature provided by Lucas Jellema, Amis).

• A JHeadstart 10.1.3.1 evaluation version with the same functionality as the production release. The only limitation in the evaluation version is that your workspace cannot contain more than 10 View Objects.
• The JHeadstart 10.1.3.1 Developers Guide
• The JHeadstart 10.1.3.1 Demo Application, which will showcase all main JHeadstart features, including user authentication and authorization.

Fusion is hot, not only in many modern kitchens, but also at Oracle, where it means the synergy between our middleware and applications offering. As you might know, the next version of our eBusiness Suite, quite appropriately referred to as Oracle Fusion Applications, is being built using ADF and other products in the Oracle Fusion Middleware range. Today we'll show you a quick recipe to cook Fusion Applications right at home, with just a cup of ADF and two tablespoons of OAF in the our favourite high-temperature JHeadstart oven. We'll show you how we created a small ADF application that hooks up nicely with classic eBS screens.

Business case

For this demo, we came up with a highly realistic business case. Imagine you sell magical wands and bought yourself a license of the Oracle eBusiness Suite to keep track of your many customers. As those customers are often a few hundred years old, they have difficulty in keeping track of their credit card numbers. Our Fusion application will help them by storing their credit card information nicely in the database, to enable them to just choose their favourite credit card from a list upon their next visit to your offline shop (these weird men with blue-silver dresses and hats don't like online shops). The application we'll build serves to manage credit cards and has only two tables to be added to the ones in the eBS suite:

Basic JHeadstart application

As we'll be cooking things in our JHeadstart oven, our model project will have to be developed in ADF Business Components. After generating the tables, we'll let JDeveloper do the dirty work and generate ADF BC artifacts based on these tables, which we'll then extend slightly to use generated PKs for new records and we added a method to the application module to generate random credit card numbers (very useful !).

When the model's ready, we fired up a JHeadstart project and spent a few clicks refining the basic application. As this was supposed to be a quick recipe, we stuck to quite simple Master-Details screens with a wizard to add new credit cards.

Fusion at your Fingertips

While the JAG is toasting our application definition file, we'll take a look at a sample eBS R12 screen that offers an overview of Customers in the system. This specific screen was custom-made with Oracle Applications Framework for the demo, but what comes next is pure personalisation and could be done to any eBS screen by a user with access rights to the personalize button.

Imagine we have this eBS customer list in front of us when another bearded old man arrives at our shop, wanting to buy a fiery fire wand. Because he forgot to bring his wallet and doesn't quite remember his teleporting spells too well, we want to quickly jump into our ADF application to see all the credit cards he used at our shop in the past. That's what JHeadstart 10.1.3 supports deep linking for, so we bring up the application definition editor, add the following to the deep linking section of the Customer group and fire up the JAG again.

Note that we deviate a little from the suggested values and expressions, because we come from a different application (outside the JSF context). We also added the deepLink == true requirement because we don't want the deep linking to be triggered every time we access the Customer page, but only when passing through this specific URL.
All we have to do left to get to 'real' Fusion is to add this deep linking URL to our eBS page as a link, which is easily done by setting the "Destination URI" for the customer name column in the personalizations screen to:

http://localhost:8988/Demo/faces/pages/Customers.jspx?deepLink=true&RowID={$TheRowId}

The resulting, personalized page will now link every eBS nicely to the appropriate ADF page!

Which leads to

That's it, Fusion in twenty clicks. Obviously, this is only a very simple business case with only one-way integration, captured in a simple and publicly accessible URL. In cases where a little more security is involved (not an issue with credit cards, is it?), you'll need to enable Oracle Single Sign-On for your eBS and the ADF application and probably some effort will go in managing the security roles appropriately.
Anyway, the above shows that small-scale integration between existing systems and JHeadstart-powered ADF is fairly easy, given the powerful deep linking functionality of JHeadstart, and might provide quick solutions in many well-scoped business cases.

The source of this mini-demo can be found here. Unzip and open the application archive, then go to the Project Properties of the "WorkingDemo" project, then to JSP Tag Libraries, and Add the 2 JSF tag libraries, ADF Faces Components, and ADF Faces HTML (which we left out to keep the zip small).

The JHeadstart Blog now has a Master Index in the right hand navigation bar, displaying links to all posts, organized by the following categories:

• Software Architecture
• JHeadstart Generic
• JHeadstart Generator Templates
• ADF (Application Development Framework) Generic
• ADF Business Components
• JSF / ADF Faces
• JDeveloper IDE
• Deployment