ADF: How to find out which ADF version is installed on a manged WebLogic server

As a developer and architect I’m working with different version of JDeveloper and WebLogic servers. Sometimes I switch version multiple times a day. Most customers have multiple deployment targets (development, QS and production) on different Weblogic servers. This make it sometimes hard to keep track of the different versions.

I searched for a way to find out which ADF Runtime is installed on a given WebLogic server. If you look at the console application or the Enterprise Manager application you’ll see no difference. Sometimes you can guess which version is running if you know which other application version is running under which server version. Still there should be a better solution.
Searching (my friend Google) the only way I found was to check the MANIFEST.MF of a specific jar on the server. As I don’t have access to a command shell on all servers this method won’t work for me. Then I stumbled upon the PrintVersion class (http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E15051_01/apirefs.1111/e10653/oracle/jbo/common/PrintVersion.html) which prints the BC4J version. A bit more digging led to the class oracle.jbo.Version which was mentioned in a really old blog entry from 2003 (http://radio-weblogs.com/0123729/stories/2003/07/10/associationConsistencyOnNondetailVos.html). This class is still available and hold information about the ADF version like the build label and BC4J version. Some of the info is stored in static final variables and only one public method Version.getAsAtring() is available.

This class is the solution I was looking for. As I couöd not build an ADF application, but needed a solution which is deployable to a managed server, I decided to implement a web service which returns the BC4J version and the build label of the ADF Runtime Library deployed ton the WebLogic server.
To make this work, I could not directly access the static final fields of the Version class. Doing this would compile the version information from the ADF Runtime Library at compile time into the web service. To access the build label which has no getter method I need to use reflection. Finally I wrote this Class

package de.hahn.blog.adfversionws;

import java.lang.reflect.Field;
import java.lang.reflect.Method;

import javax.jws.WebMethod;
import javax.jws.WebService;

import oracle.jbo.Version;


@WebService
public class AdfVersion
{
    public AdfVersion()
    {
        super();
    }

    @WebMethod
    public String getVersion()
    {
        return Version.getAsString();
    }
    
    @WebMethod
    public String getBuildLabel()
    {
        Class<?> cl = null;
        try
        {
            cl = this.getClass().getClassLoader().loadClass("oracle.jbo.Version");
        }
        catch (ClassNotFoundException e)
        {
            e.printStackTrace();
            return e.getMessage();
        }

        Method[] lDeclaredMethods = cl.getDeclaredMethods();
        Field[] lDeclaredFields = cl.getDeclaredFields();
        try
        {
            Field lDeclaredField = cl.getDeclaredField("buildLabel");
            String y = (String) lDeclaredField.get(lDeclaredField);
            return y;
        }
        catch (IllegalAccessException e3)
        {
            e3.printStackTrace();
            return e3.getMessage();
        }
        catch (NoSuchFieldException e)
        {
            e.printStackTrace();
            return e.getMessage();
        }
    }    
}

To make the web service independent from the Jdeveloper ADF Runtime I reference the ADF Runtime Library which is deployed on the server as shared library ‘adf.oracle.domain’. For this I created a weblogic-application.xml descriptor and add the library ref to it.

<?xml version = '1.0' encoding = 'UTF-8'?>
<weblogic-application xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
                      xsi:schemaLocation="http://xmlns.oracle.com/weblogic/weblogic-application http://xmlns.oracle.com/weblogic/weblogic-application/1.1/weblogic-application.xsd"
                      xmlns="http://xmlns.oracle.com/weblogic/weblogic-application">
  <library-ref>
    <library-name>adf.oracle.domain</library-name>
  </library-ref>
</weblogic-application>

Now, after deployment of the EAR you can test the web service on different servers with different ADF Runtime Libraries deployed and see something like

WLS 10.3.5 with ADF 11.1.1.5.0 Runtime Library

or

WLS 10.3.5 + Sherman Patch and ADF Runtime 11.1.2.1.0

The ear should be deployable on all 10.3.x WebLogic servers.

You can download the workspace (build with JDev 11.1.2.1.0) from here: blogadfversoinws-zip.doc
Please rename the file to ‘.zip’ after downloading it! There in no DB connection needed.