Branislav Nemec

If you (or a member of your team) are an Oracle Reports developer you can leverage your Reports skills also with ADF Faces applications. Since Oracle Reports server is part of Oracle Application Server 10g R2 and ADF Faces applications require Oracle AS 10g R3 you might find yourself in need to call the Reports server from different domain. It also might be the case of very scalable infrastructure when you have different parts of Oracle AS (infrastructure, portal, reports, ADF applications) on different servers.

Some visitors of my blog complained they couldn't find links to showcasts. I guess that those running Linux cannot see the video plug-in area where video in wmv format should be being played. So I decided to alternate each video also in form of flash and provide link to the separate page with Camtasia flash player. btw. I am using ADF Faces component objectMedia that has no support for flash format (at least for me it doesn't work). I hope it will have in the future. I hope it will be ok also for Linuxies... sorry again for inconveniences

Oracle Maps is a part of Oracle Application Server MapViewer - the tool that visualize spatial data stored in Oracle Database using Oracle Locator or Spatial. What I like very much on Locator/Spatial is that I, as a GIS non-expert, can use Locator/Spatial just through SQL. Oracle Maps has a rich JavaScript API so with it we even don't need SQL to visualize spatial data. Since it is JavaScript client, we can integrate it to HTML/JSP/JSF/ADF Faces application. Furthermore it is based on AJAX technology and uses Map Cache server so you can develop "google like" maps.

Current af:table component has one lack. You cannot simply show total sum of column. After a bit of googling I have found this nice solution from Frank Nimphius "ADF Faces: Compute totals of selected rows in a multi select table" . In my demo you can see the simplest way how to just show total of a column.

In the upcoming version of ADF Faces 11g we will have JSF graph component but so far we don't have. So we must use either third party JSF graph component or integrate Oracle BI Graph Bean. The video shows how to integrate BI Graph Bean into ADF Faces application via non JSF JSP declaratively using JDeveloper wizard.

Oracle Maps JavaScript API provide us with info window where we can show data related to feature of interest we click on. But if we want to show more complex data the simple bubble is not enough. In this case we can show some basic data in info window and the additional data in new browser window where we pass parameter to recognize our object and use it in the business logic.

If you google around the Internet and find the reference to your work it makes you feel proud of it. I am pleased to be among the other JDeveloper/ADF success stories on OTN and also part of the Oracle Magazine article. Seems like our projects based on ADF and Oracle Maps are quite interesting for others. b.

Scenario: We have list of some items. Each item has a code and a name. User wants to list through items using combobox where code and name is shown and have possibility to swap columns. After swapping columns also sorting should be set by first column.

Well in my project based on ADF BC + ADF Faces I am using also Oracle Maps. Oracle Maps has very rich JavaScript API so in most cases it's enough just to use this API and to only solve communication between Maps and surrounding ADF components. But sometimes we need some special functionality that is not included in Oracle Maps API

I needed to highlight some subtotal rows in table to get better orientation in sea of numbers. I couldn't find solution to change the style of cells' border or background colour so I helped myself by changing colour of font in those rows. It is not perfect solution but at least something. To make it work we need just add CSS selector to define the font colour and use EL in StyleClass of each outputText of each column of table.

Good news for all developers trying to integrate Oracle Maps with ADF Faces. You can find new version Of Oracle Maps as a part of MapViewer 11g (again it's only Preview release 1) on OTN. It has many improvements and one of them is possibility to access MapViewer server on cross-domain. It's very important feature because so far we had to use proxy server running on client machine to run Oracle Maps directly from JDeveloper or deploy application to OC4J with MapViewer to see maps. Since now it is very simple to test our maps because we can run Oracle Maps directly from JDeveloper using embedded OC4J without any configuration and call MapViewer installed on other domain. Here is the link to MapViewer on OTN: http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/mapviewer/index.html

ADF Faces components use property ShortDesc to render tooltip when you move mouse cursor over the component on the page. But sometimes you might be surprised that the tooltip is not shown. Especially when you expose data with af:table and you use abbreviations in column headers and want to use tooltip to explain those abbreviations. The following video shows how to get tooltip to the column header.

How to customize af:table Some of the ADF Faces components appearance is not completely adjustable. One of them is af:table where it is (I think) impossible to get rid of navigation links "previous" "next". But sometimes we need expose result in form of one or more columns and don't have space for navigation links. We can achieve this by using HTML DIV element with style set to oververflow:auto option.

I am proud to announce a new ADF Faces based web application aimed to public use. The National Forest Center of Slovakia as a source of information on Slovak forests has launched a new public portal about forests and forestry of Slovakia: www.forestportal.sk. The solution is based on Oracle Portal. Besides more or less static information provided through the Portal we also developed ADF Faces based application to provide actual aggregate basic information on Slovakian forests in form of tables, graphs and maps.

Since ADF Faces 10.1.3 are missing nice JSF menu component I did research if there is one suitable and cooperating with ADF Faces.

I decided to share with my trouble I faced lately with Mapviewer that turned up as a Java VM problem.

JDeveloper is really a tool you can be very productive with and not only develop but also deploy with choice. Like the splash window of JDeveloper (some developer guys find it stodgy) outlines: Develop with choice is probably wish of most of Java developers today.

Seems like since development stage with ADF 11g is smooth more or less with JDeveloper 11g, there are many not nice bugs when you try to deploy your application to Oracle WLS 10.3.0 After two days fighting with deployment of my application to the stand alone Oracle Web Logic server 10.3.0 I finally made it work. Since it is full of pitfalls (Oracle, Oracle!!!) I decided to share the tricks with you.

With the new ADF Faces components 11g Rich Client we can very easily include geographical maps into a Fusion Application via out-of-the-box ready JSF components. But we are faced the problem if we are not satisfied with UI of the component or its behaviour. In this case we can integrate Oracle Maps into ADF Faces application like in common HTML page.