Oracle ADF Quintessentials

JDev: 12.2.1.3.0 Source:  GitHub This article talks about querying ADF BC REST services using a RowFinder , and displaying different data sets based on our needs, using REST Shaping . REST Shaping This is a powerful tool provided by ADF BC to determine the kind of data you can expose to the end user. Imagine this use-case where we need to display certain attributes of an employee on the front-end application depending on whether we have an anonymous or an authenticated user, while we retain all the features of the view object (View criteria, custom SQL etc). Creating multiple copies of the same VO is certainly not an option. REST shaping allows you to create metadata on the view object, identified by a unique name, where you can specify which columns may displayed and which all may be hidden. See examples below, which show two shapes created - AuthView and NoAuthView, each showing different data sets. Important Note : Each REST instance suppo...

JDev: 12.2.1.3.0 Source:  GitHub XML generation is something we use quite extensively in ADF products - be it for PDF generation, or for printing labels on a Zebra printer or for sending data to an external system. And ADF BC does have an out-of-the-box support for generating XML documents straight out of its view objects, via its writeXML API. However, there are times when we need to stretch the XML documents - maybe create a custom XML, or import a custom node inside a ADF BC generated XML. This article intends to provide a working solution for these extra bits, along with a few tweaks for the standard process. This article will cover 3 use-cases: 1. Generate a standard XML from ADF BC, with node names of our choice. 2. Generate a custom XML from an XSD schema. 3. Combine the above two XMLs into a composite XML document. The sample application uses Departments and Employees tables from HR schema. To keep the size of the XMLs small, the VOs have been tuned t...

JDev: 12.2.1.3.0 Source: 1)  GoogleLib 2)  Application This would be the third, final and the shortest article on the topic of integrating ADF Faces with Google's NoSQL Firebase database. In my previous two articles -  Oracle ADF with Google Firebase and  Oracle ADF with Google Firebase (Part II - Secure CRUD)  - I have spoken about setting up Firebase database reference and performing secure CRUD operations. I have used Firebase Admin setup for Java for all of my activities. This article explores another great feature in this package - Google Cloud Storage . Unfortunately, the Admin SDK is quite limited when it comes to storage. Almost all the great features have been exposed to the Android SDK or the web/JavaScript SDK libraries. But nonetheless, with whatever is available, we can store documents on the Firebase cloud storage and access them via a secured protocol. To set up cloud storage, we need to extend our Firebase initialization to include...

JDev: 12.2.1.3.0 Source:  GitHub In my previous blog -  Oracle ADF with Google Firebase  - I wrote about integrating ADF Faces with a NoSQL database like Google Firebase. Till now I only discussed about fetching data from an insecure connection. But in a real world scenario, we would want the REST APIs to be secured so that only an authenticated user should be able to access the database. This article will extend the previous application further by securing the REST APIs with a web token, and will ensure that a Bearer token is required in order to access the data. This article will also showcase generic crud operations. Google Firebase also allows provides it's own authentication system, however, we will not be using that, since our application will be hosted on WebLogic server, which is supposed to take care of authentication and authorization. What we would do is to generate a secure token once WebLogic authenticates and authorizes the user, and use this to...

JDev: 12.2.1.3.0 Source:  GitHub This article talks about an interesting integration of Oracle ADF with Google's Firebase database. For those of you who are not aware of this, Firebase is a NoSQL cloud database service, provided free of cost (well, it's free for most of the way) by Google. Reference:  Google Firebase We also had our eye on MongoDB cloud , but Firebase won the race for one simple reason - it provides out-of-the-box REST API connectors for it's entire data structure, and wrappers for query purposes . You do not need to write or manage a single line of code. Additionally, it provided access for firestore  - an online storage space to upload documents. The data-structure of firebase is quite unique - it stores data as a JSON tree. Every node of that tree is exposed as a REST URL, and all you need is to use the URL in your application. To show an example, here's what Department and Employee structures look like in Firebase: To...

JDev: 12.2.1.3.0 Sources: 1)  ErrorCodeDemo1-GitHub , 2)  ErrorCodeDemo2-GitHub Quite often I see developers ignoring proper error redirection for 401 unauthorized access scenarios. The usual behaviour is to put an enterprise/application role constraint for the homepage and relying on the J2EE container to deliver the default error page. Not only does it look ugly, but it also breaks the application flow, as the end user has no other option provided to rectify the error. This article talks about two simple approaches to display our own error page when an unauthorized user accesses your application. The end-result would be displaying something like this: Approach 1: Declarative This is a simple, one-step approach. You just define a reference to your own error page inside web.xml file, which gets called for a 401 error code. Approach 2: Programmatic The second approach is slightly elaborate. But effectively, there is no difference in the end-result...

JDev: 12.2.1.3.0 Source:  GitHub Business requirements can be strange and demanding at times. They would make you look deeper into the framework and try to find out mechanisms to bypass usual behaviour. I recently worked on a requirement where the customer was in love with Input-List-Of-Values component and wanted to know if I could stretch it further. Here's what he wanted: 1. Allow the Input-List-Of-Values to accept values which were not in the list. 2. On entering such a value, fire a validation which would show a warning message that the value is not in the list. 3. From the developer's stand-point, we also wanted to update the model then and there , as we were using the current row's attributes for some other logic processing. Of course, this third point was our concern, not the customer's. So let's see how to go ahead with this. I have an application which displays one row of a transient view object. The "FirstNameAttr" attribut...