Chris Muir

There’s a rather obscure JDeveloper bug that only effects IE7, for af:columns in af:tables that show af:outputText fields based on dates that are null (phew, try and say that with a mouth full of wheaties). It occurs in 11.1.1.4.0 and 11.1.2.0.0 (and all versions in between it’s assumed). In the previous picture from IE7 if you look closely, you’ll notice that the HireDate2 column has lost its border for the null entries. Note the other columns even when they are null, still have a border. If we look under IE8 (or any other browser for that matter) we see the problem doesn’t occur at all: The problem is being caused by 2 separate issues: IE7 does not render borders for HTML table cells (ie. the tag) if the cell contains no data. This can be fixed if the cell contains a   tag. ADF Faces RC includes the   tag for empty table cells, except for null date af:outp... (more)

Retrieving Managed Beans Programmatically

From time to time in JSF and ADF Faces RC applications there’s the need from one managed bean to retrieve another, typically from a lesser scoped bean to a greater, such as a requestScope bean retrieving a sessionScope bean to access its methods. There’s essentially three avenues to solving this problem: 1) The following JSF 1.1 createValueBinding method that retrieves the bean using EL: FacesContext ctx = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance(); Application app = ctx.getApplication(); ValueBinding bind = app.createValueBinding("#{beanName}"); Bean bean = (Bean) bind.getValue(ctx); Note ... (more)

ADF Takeaways from Oracle Open World 2011

With the huge amount of sessions at Oracle Open World, it’s often hard to find the little gems of information amongst all the marketing. This is true of ADF like all other technologies at the conference, there’s simply a lot of information to digest and filter. Luckily Oracle publishes the presentations PPTs afterwards and it’s possible to find a jewel or two in all the content with some careful searching. For the ADF developers among us, this blog post attempts to summarize some of the main ADF takeaways from Oracle Open World 2011. Please remember this is my summary, not Oracle... (more)

Book Review: Middleware and Cloud Computing

With the explosion of Internet content, especially that for the IT industry, it leaves an interesting question hanging over the worth (if any) of IT textbooks. When you can find an answer on just about anything online, what’s the point of shelling out money, especially for IT texts that have been overpriced for sometime? Frank Munz’s Middleware and Cloud Computing: Oracle on Amazon Web Services and Rackspace Cloud book is a good reminder of one key fact about text books in context of an internet society, they can save you a lot of research and time on the internet looking for th... (more)

The Magic Sauce for Multi-Browser-Tab Support in JDeveloper ADF Apps

Within JDev 11g+ experienced ADF programmers will be familiar with PageFlowScope beans used by tasks flows, in particular Bounded Task Flows (BTFs) where they provide the equivalent of session scope for variables for the life of the BTF for a specific user session. Indeed the Oracle documentation says the following about PageFlowScope beans: Choose this scope if you want the managed bean to be accessible across the activities within a task flow. A managed bean that has a pageFlow scope shares state with pages from the task flow that access it. A managed bean that has a pageFlow ... (more)