The JDeveloper application is the highest level in the organizational structure. While you are developing your application, it stores information about the objects you are working with. At the same time, it keeps track of your projects and all environment settings.

Based on prebuilt templates, a JDeveloper application allows you to specify a predefined type of environment, depending on the type of application you want to create (web application, Java application, and so on). Application templates provide you with a quick way to create the project structure for standard applications with the appropriate combination of features already specified. The application template also filters the work you do in JDeveloper such that the choices available are focused only on the features you are working with.

The application template you select determines the initial project structure, that is, the named project folders within the application workspace, and the application libraries that will be added. The project or projects in the application define the associated features.

A JDeveloper project, which is used to logically group files that are related, keeps track of the source files, packages, classes, images, and other elements that your program may need. Projects manage environment variables such as the source and output paths used for compiling and running your program. Projects also maintain compiler, runtime, and debugging options so that you can customize the behavior of those tools per project.

You can add multiple projects to your application to easily access, modify, and reuse your source code. Different projects might contain files representing different tiers of a multi-tier application, for instance, or different subsystems of a complex application. These files can reside in any directory and still be contained within a single project.

A new application created from a template appears in the Applications window already partitioned into tiered projects, with the associated features set in each project. Projects are displayed as the top level in the hierarchy in the Applications window. The Custom Application template that you used for your application creates one project using a default project name (or the project name you entered).

In the Applications window you can collapse and expand any panel. You adjust the size of panels by dragging the splitter between two panels. To group and sort items in the Projects panel, use the Navigator Display Options dropdown menu. For application operations, you can click Application Menu and select an option from the dropdown menu.

JDeveloper has the capability of recognizing many different file types, displaying each in its appropriate viewer or editor when you double-click the file in the Applications window. Closing an application or project closes all open editors or viewers for files in that application or project and unloads the files from memory.

Note: Nodes in italics in the Applications window mean that the elements have not yet been saved. A project node is bold when a file in the project is selected.

From the main menu, select Application > Show Overview. The Application Overview window opens in the editor window area.

All objects that you create within JDeveloper appear in the Application Overview file summary pages, arranged by object type. As you create new files and artifacts, you can view them filtered by status and project.

You can optionally close the Application Overview window, since you will not be using it to create objects for this application<

In the source editor, other features available to you while you're editing include:

• Java Code Insight, the Java-specific implementation of completion insight

• Code Assist to fix common problems

• Import statement assistance and sorting

• Automatic doc comment templates

• Customizable sorting and expansion for the Structure window

• Distinctive highlighting for syntax and semantic errors

• Customizable code separators

Press F1 in the source editor if you want to learn more about these features.

The tabs at the top of the editor window are document tabs.

Selecting a document tab gives that file focus, bringing it to the foreground of the window in the current editor. The tabs at the bottom of the editor window for a given file are the editor tabs. Selecting an editor tab opens the file in that editor or viewer.

When you complete the steps for creating a service class, the Applications window should look like this:

Any JavaBean that publishes business objects and provides methods that manipulate business objects is defined as a business service. Examples of business services include web services, EJB session beans, or any Java class being used as an interface to some functionality. In the example, the AddressBook service class returns a collection of contact names.

Oracle ADF data controls provide an abstraction of the business service's data model, giving the ADF binding layer access to the service layer. When designing a user interface, you can bind page UI components to data through the ADF data controls, without writing any code.

ADF data controls provide a consistent mechanism for clients and web application controllers to access data and actions defined by these data-provider technologies:

• JavaBeans, including TopLink-enabled objects

• ADF Business Components

• EJB session beans

• Web services

If you use JavaBeans technology as your business service technology, model information will be exposed to the view and controller layers through ADF data control interfaces implemented by thin, Oracle-provided adapter classes.

The DCX definition file identifies the Oracle ADF model layer adapter classes that facilitate the interaction between the client and the available business services.

There is one DCX file per project and the file is created the first time you register a data control on a business service. The DCX file serves as a "table of contents" listing all the data controls in the project. Out of all the possible service classes you might have in your project, it records those that you've asked the design time to make available as data binding objects.

When expanded, the AddressBook node shows the structure of the business service. While the AddressBook data control node itself is not an item you can use, you may select from among the displayed objects it supports.

The hierarchical structure of a business service is determined by:

• Which business services you have registered with the data controls in your model project. The Data Controls panel displays a separate root node for each business service that you register.

• A bean design time description definition file that is generated when you create the data control for the bean. The bean definition file classifies the bean's property accessors and methods into various categories.

If you expand all the nodes in the Projects panel, you should see that JDeveloper has also added the file adfm.xml. This file, which is not used at runtime, is the registry used by the Data Controls panel in JDeveloper to locate the data controls that appear in the data model project.

Selecting features for a project enables you to filter the choices offered by the New Gallery, so that the choices you see are targeted to the type of work you are doing.

Features are set per project. They are used only within JDeveloper to assist you as you work, and have no effect on the data in the project itself. Adding ADF Faces automatically propagates the required associated features in the Selected pane.

The JSF pages you create for your application using JavaServer Faces can be Facelets documents (which have file extension .jsf) or JSP documents written in XML syntax (which have file extension .jspx).

You can create both types of JSF pages with the Create JSF Page dialog, opening it from:

• The New Gallery

• The JSF navigation diagrammer

• The ADF task flow diagrammer (available only in the Studio edition of JDeveloper)

When you create a new JSF page as a Facelets document type (with file extension .jsf), JDeveloper automatically creates a starter page structure with one xmlns attribute for the JSF Core tag library and one xmlns attribute for the ADF Faces tag library. The other elements included in a starter file are elements for laying out a page, specifically everything else within <f:view> and </f:view>.

To view the page code, click the Source tab to switch from the visual editor to the XML editor. For example, the following code is generated for the new page:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
 "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<f:view xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core"
        xmlns:af="http://xmlns.oracle.com/adf/faces/rich">
  <af:document title="ContactList.jsf" id="d1">
    <af:form id="f1"></af:form>
  </af:document>
</f:view>

When you complete the steps for creating a JSF page, the View project in the Applications window should look something like this:



In the project, the folders and files that conform to the Java EE Web module directory structure are:

• Web Content folder: Contains the pages you create, along with other files that must be visible to the client browser (such as stylesheet files and images) for your application.

• /WEB-INF/ folder: Contains the required Web Application Deployment Descriptor (web.xml) and the JSF configuration file (faces-config.xml).

• web.xml file: The web application deployment descriptor for your application. This is an XML file describing the components that make up your application, along with any initialization parameters and container-managed security constraints that you want the server to enforce for you.

• faces-config.xml file: Where you register the JSF application's configuration resources, such as validators, converters, managed beans, and navigation rules.

• trinidad-config.xml file: Where you configure ADF Faces features such as skin family and level of page accessibility support.

Oracle ADF data controls are represented in the Data Controls panel as data collections, attributes, and methods as well as specific, built-in operations that are generic to all data collections. The objects in the panel can be added to the view or web pages as databound UI components or to the controller as operations.

When you insert a component from the Data Controls panel, a new Oracle ADF binding will be defined in the page's UI model and the inserted component will contain references to Oracle ADF bindings, using EL (expression language) syntax.

The code that the Data Controls panel generates in your web page or client document, and the bindings that it creates depend on the type of document displayed in the visual editor and the combination of business service and visual element you select and drop into the open document.

When you use the Data Controls panel to create a UI component, JDeveloper automatically creates the various code and objects needed to bind the component to the data control you selected. To see the ADF data bindings defined for the page, click Bindings at the bottom of the editor window.



The Contact tree binding object uses the iterator binding object findAllContactsIterator to get its values. The iterator accesses the method findAllContacts() in the AddressBook data control, and returns a collection.

When you create a databound table using the Data Controls panel, JDeveloper adds the following ADF Faces tags to your page:

• <af:messages> used at the top of an application page to give users important messaging information.

• <af:table>, used to display tabular data.

• <af:column>, used to create separate columns in the table.

• <af:outputText>, which supports styled text.

ADF data binding expressions are added to every component attribute that will either display data from or reference properties of a binding object. You can examine the component attributes and ADF data binding expressions in the XML editor by clicking Source in the editor window. The binding expressions, which use EL (expression language), are evaluated at runtime.

A typical ADF data binding EL expression uses the following syntax to reference any of the different types of binding objects in the binding container:

#{bindings.BindingObject.propertyName}

where bindings is a variable that identifies that the binding object being referenced by the expression is located in the binding container of the current page. All ADF data binding EL expressions must start with the bindings variable.

Note: You can also refer to bindings using data.<PageDefName>.<binding>. The bindings. notation is just a shortcut to refer to the bindings on a page.

At runtime, the EL expression is evaluated and a value is pulled from the binding object to populate the component with data when the page is displayed.

For example, consider the first column in the databound table. The headerText attribute of the first column has the binding expression #{bindings.Contact.hints.name.label}, which results in the column heading name in the table at runtime.

By default, JDeveloper automatically configures an integrated server named Integrated WebLogic Server that references a user-specific instance of Oracle WebLogic Server bundled with the IDE. Read more... Integrated WebLogic Server is a Java EE runtime service for packaged archive deployment. Based on zero-copy deployment, Integrated WebLogic Server lets you run and test an application and its projects as a Java EE application in a Java EE container. No special connection setup is required to use Integrated WebLogic Server. You can run the entire application, a project, or individual JSF pages.

When you run a JSF application in the IDE, JDeveloper automatically:

• Starts Integrated WebLogic Server, if not already running.

• Compiles and deploys the application to Integrated WebLogic Server.

• Launches the application in your default browser using the following default address: http://<your_machine_IP_address>:<http_port>/<your_application_name>-<your_project_name>-context-root>/faces/<path_to_the_page>

To stop the application, click Terminate in JDeveloper and select the application bound instance DataBoundApp from the dropdown menu.

Note: Terminating the application stops and undeploys the application from Integrated WebLogic Server but it does not terminate Integrated WebLogic Server.

When you complete the steps for adding the data control to the JSF page, the View project in the Applications window, should now look like this:



The new files added to the Application Sources folder in the View project include:

• ContactListPageDef.xml: The page definition file for the JSF page. A page definition file defines the Oracle ADF binding objects that populate the data in UI components at runtime, providing the interaction between the UI components on the page in the View project and the business service components in the Model project.
  
  For every page that uses ADF bindings, there must be a corresponding page definition file that defines the binding objects used by that page. So each time you design a new page using the Data Controls panel and the visual editor, JDeveloper will create a new page definition file. You might need to edit the binding definitions in the page definition files if you remove binding expressions from your view pages.
  
  Page definition files provide design time access to all the ADF bindings. At runtime, the binding objects defined by a page definition file are instantiated in a binding container, which is the runtime instance of the page definition file.

• DataBindings.cpx: The file defines the Oracle ADF binding context for the entire application and provides the metadata from which the ADF binding objects are created at runtime. The binding context is a container object that holds a list of available data controls and data binding objects. It maps individual pages to the binding definitions in the page definition files and registers the data controls used by those pages. At runtime, only the data controls listed in the DataBindings.cpx file are available to the current application.

Oracle ADF control hints provides a centralized mechanism for any JavaBeans-based business service data item to be rendered in a consistent manner across all client types. Read more... This mechanism, known as control hints, permits application developers to centralize certain UI settings across clients and thereby control many aspects of the way the UI interacts with the data item. Because the control hints are set at the level of the business service, it can also reduce the amount of UI coding.

The ADF control hints mechanism supports these control hint properties that you can customize:

• Display Hint: Determines whether the attribute will be displayed or not.

• Label: The text used in prompts or table headers that precede the value of a data item.

• Tooltip: The text used in tooltips or flyover text. In web applications, it appears as the value of the HTML ALT attribute.

• Format Type: Defines the formatter to use when the data item is displayed. Formatters are basically a collection of format masks that you can define in the <JDeveloper_Install>/jdeveloper/systemn.n.n.../o.BC4J/formatinfo.xml file.

• Format: The particular format mask used by the selected formatter.

• Control Type: The control type used to display the data item in the client UI: Edit makes the control editable, Date displays a calendar picker, and Default is interpreted by the client to select the most appropriate control.

• Display Width: Defines the character width of the control that displays the data item.

• Display Height: Defines the number of character rows of the control that displays the data item.

• Form Type: Determines whether the attribute will be displayed in Detail or Summary mode. Detail mode produces a long form, Summary mode a short one. This property is supported for ADF Swing applications only; it is not available for Business Components web applications.

• Field Order: Defines the numeric order in which you want the attribute to render within a category

• Category: The identifier to be used by the dynamic rendering user interface to group attributes for display. The user interface will render the attribute with other attributes of the same category. You can use the category hint to aid the user interface to separate a large list of view object attributes into smaller groups related by categories. This control hint will be utilized by any dynamic rendering user interface that displays the attribute.

• Auto Submit: Triggers a partial submit on value changes in the user interface when set to true (enabled).

When you add control hints at the business service level, JDeveloper creates a .properties file for you that contains the text resources for the project.
The file that defines the value for the control hints you set depends on the specific business service used for the project. In the case of beans-based business services, (including JavaBeans, Enterprise JavaBeans, and Oracle TopLink), by default JDeveloper generates a standard .properties file for the project's text resources and saves the control hint definitions as translatable strings.

Notice in the Applications window that the file ModelBundle.properties has been added to the Model project in the model package:



The project-level resource bundle option JDeveloper uses to save control hints is determined by the Resource Bundle page of the Project Properties dialog. By default JDeveloper sets the Resource Bundle Type option to Properties Bundle, which produces a .properties file.

The first time you customize a control hint in the project, JDeveloper creates the ModelBundle.properties file. The ModelBundle.properties file contains translatable key strings for the control hint definitions you added. For example, if you open ModelBundle.properties in the source editor, you should see the following code that identifies the translatable string:

#
acme.bean.Contact.name_LABEL=Contact Name

In the browser page, you can expand the width of a table column by dragging one end of the column header. If you had selected the Enable Sorting checkbox when you added the databound table at design time, you can sort the column contents by selecting the Sort Ascending or Sort Descending icon on a column header:

To create a table that is bound to a parameterized method, you will drag the Contact method return that is located under findContactsByName(String) in the Data Controls panel. The parameterized method has one parameter, name.

When you don't want content to be stretched, Oracle recommends creating islands of non-stretched content by wrapping the content in a panel group layout component with layout="scroll". The panel group layout component is an ideal component for non-stretched content because it can be stretched and does not stretch its children.

The second panel group layout component with layout="horizontal" is then used to lay out the content components in a horizontal fashion.

When you enter sh in the input field and click the button, the contacts that have 'sh' in their names are returned in the table:



Because you previously entered label text for the Contact email and address attributes using control hints, the label text that is stored in the ModelBundle.properties file is applied to the column headers in this table as well.