JDeveloper: Showing a Popup when Selecting an af:selectOneRadio

A question on the new OTN JDeveloper and ADF forum (or space if you like the new name better) inspired this post.

Use Case
The use case is to show a popup each time the user clicks on one of the radiobuttons of a button group. This popup should show an inputText component to let the user enter some text for the selection. After the selection the text is shown on the page under the button group.
To make it more interesting, it was not ask for this in the question, the popup should show which radio button was clicked.
UPDATE
An additional question on the OTN forum asks how to display the label of the selected radiobutton and not it’s value. I updated the workspace to show how to implement this.

Implementation UPDATE
The use case sounds easy first: add a showPopupBehavior to the selectItem to show the popup and show the selected radioValue as the title of the dialog inside the popup. Problem with this solution is that a selectItem can’t handle client listeners, which a showPopupBehavior is under the hood. If you try this you get an error

Caused by: javax.servlet.jsp.JspException: ADF_FACES-60023:Component: RichSelectItem[UIXFacesBeanImpl, id=si10] does not support client listeners.

Putting the showPopupBehavior onto the af:selectOneRadio isn’t a solution either as this would would allow to show the popup, but would prevent the selection of the radio button. This is because the showPopupBehavior is a client behavior tag which prevents the event to
go further.

The solution to the problem is to use a valueChangeListener on the af:selectOneRadio and show the popup from the bean code. Before showing the popup we need to process the value change event to get the selected value in the dialog of the popup.

The UI part looks like

        <af:panelGroupLayout id="pgl2">
          <af:selectOneRadio label="Activation" id="sor1" value="#{bindings.SelectedActivation1.inputValue}"
                             inlineStyle="border-width:thin; border-color:Blue; border-style:solid;"
                             valueChangeListener="#{RadiobuttonPopupBean.activationChangedListener}" autoSubmit="true">
            <af:selectItem label="Active" value="active" id="si1"/>
            <af:selectItem label="Inactive" value="not active" id="si2"/>
          </af:selectOneRadio>
          <af:outputText value="Last reason: #{bindings.PopupText1.inputValue}" id="ot1" partialTriggers="d1"/>
        </af:panelGroupLayout>
        <af:popup id="p1" contentDelivery="lazyUncached" binding="#{RadiobuttonPopupBean.radioPopup}">
          <af:dialog id="d1" title="Selected: #{bindings.SelectedActivation1.inputValue}">
            <af:inputText label="Reason" id="it1" value="#{bindings.PopupText1.inputValue}"/>
          </af:dialog>
        </af:popup>

The listener code in the bean, which is created in request scope as it contains a reference to a ui component, look like

import javax.faces.context.FacesContext;
import javax.faces.event.ValueChangeEvent;

import oracle.adf.view.rich.component.rich.RichPopup;

import org.apache.myfaces.trinidad.util.ComponentReference;

public class RadiobuttonPopupBean {
    private ComponentReference radioPopup;

    public void setRadioPopup(RichPopup radioPopup) {
        this.radioPopup = ComponentReference.newUIComponentReference(radioPopup);
    }

    public RichPopup getRadioPopup() {
        if (radioPopup != null)
            return (RichPopup)radioPopup.getComponent();

        return null;
    }

    public void activationChangedListener(ValueChangeEvent valueChangeEvent) {
        // process updates to get the selected value inside the popup
        FacesContext contxt = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance();
        valueChangeEvent.getComponent().processUpdates(contxt);
        //show the popup
        RichPopup.PopupHints hint = new  RichPopup.PopupHints();
        getRadioPopup().show(hint);
    }
}

The application running look like


You see that the popup shows the value of the selected radio button as the title and the entered text in the popup is shown as ‘last reason’ below the radio button group. This ‘magic’ is done by simply adding a partial trigger to the outputText component which is listening to the dialog inside the popup.
As the sample don’t store the value of the selection of the radio group or the entered text in the db, I use the variable iterator to store these values. More about this technique can be found in my blog

UPDATED IMPLEMENTATION
As the use case changed a bit I changes the solution in a way to show how to implement this. First step is that I added another attribute to the variables iterator to store the selected label. The attribute is name ‘SelectedActivation1’ and is of type String. This attribute is needed as it’s not easyly possible to get the selected label of the radiobutton outside the selection listener. The changed valueChangeListener looks like the code below:

    public void activationChangedListener(ValueChangeEvent valueChangeEvent) {
        // process updates to get the selected value inside the popup
        FacesContext contxt = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance();
        valueChangeEvent.getComponent().processUpdates(contxt);
        //get the selected lable from the radio button
        // for this we need to iterate over the children of hte af:selectOneRadio
        // and find the child which has the same value as the new value
        RichSelectOneRadio rsoc =
            (RichSelectOneRadio)valueChangeEvent.getSource();
        List childList = rsoc.getChildren();
        String newVal = (String)valueChangeEvent.getNewValue();
        for (int i = 0; i < childList.size(); i++) {
            if (childList.get(i) instanceof RichSelectItem) {
                RichSelectItem csi = (RichSelectItem)childList.get(i);
                if (((String)csi.getValue()).equals(newVal)) {
                    // get the binding container
                    BindingContainer bindings = BindingContext.getCurrent().getCurrentBindingsEntry();

                    // get an ADF attributevalue from the ADF page definitions
                    AttributeBinding attr = (AttributeBinding)bindings.getControlBinding("SelectedLabel1");
                    // and store the label there
                    attr.setInputValue(csi.getLabel());
                }
            }
        }
        //show the popup
        RichPopup.PopupHints hint = new RichPopup.PopupHints();
        getRadioPopup().show(hint);
    }

The images below showing the changes application

You can download the workspace from the ADF EMG Sample Project BlogTestRadiobutton.zip. The sample uses the HR DB schema (even as this is not really needed for the sample).

JDeveloper: Navigation after Return from Bounded Task Flow

A question on the OTN JDeveloper and ADF ‘Space’ asked for a sample and/or tutorial on how to navigate after a bounded task flow, based on pages, returns from its work.
I setup a sample application to show how this works. The application is built using JDeveloper 11.1.1.7.0 and uses the HR DB schema. The sample can be loaded using the link provided at the end of the post.
Before we start let’s take a look at the running application:


Now that we have seen how the application works let’s check out how it’s implemented.

We start with an unbounded task flow (adfc-config.xml) which look like

Unbounded Task Flow: adfc-config.xml

Unbounded Task Flow: adfc-config.xml


We see that the application is built from two pages, a ‘Start’ page and an ‘End’ page. The ‘Start’ page can call a bounded task flow employee-btf. The start page holds one button ‘Start’ which calls the bounded task flow which is shown below.

Bounded Task Flow: employee-btf.xml

Bounded Task Flow: employee-btf.xml

This task flow shows a table of employees and allows to navigate to a detail page where the employee data can be changed. Depending on the result of the change, we navigate back to the start page (when the rollback button is clicked) or we navigate to the ‘end’ page if the changes are committed (using the commit button). The buttons are calling the navigation case named ‘start’ or ‘end’ which are task flow return cases which are looking like

Task Flow Return: Start

Task Flow Return: Start

or

Task Flow Return: End

Task Flow Return: End

As you see the return for ‘start’ calls a parent navigation ‘start’ which is implemented using a ‘wild card’ navigation ‘*’. Same is true for ‘end’ task flow return call. Once the navigation is given back to the parent task flow, it looks for a navigation with the name of the outcome ‘start’ or ‘end’ and executes the navigation.

The sample can be loaded from the ADF EMG Samples workspace BlogUBTBTFNavigation.zip

A (First) Day in New OTN Forums

Aside

As you may have noticed the long awaited upgrade of the Oracle OTN forum software has taken place over the weekend. I did not know what to expect from the upgrade (second one I gone through), other than the few comments from Sonya Barry in the Community Feedback Forum.

Well, in summary it could have been worse. My personal feeling is that it’s too colorful and overloaded. This may however change once we (I) know where to click and look to get what are looking for.

Today, the first day the new forum is visible, I had some trouble. The page didn’t load all the times, I could log in but the page did not reflect this, some times the page simply crashed.

Now after some time the login problem is solved. We can login and create new threads or answer them. Here, however Oracle need to do some fine tuning.
Right now I can’t find out which threads I’m participating. I have tried the e-mail notification, I follow the threads, which I have to do for every thread as I have not found the option ‘follow threads I’m participating’, but I don’t get a notification (mail or in the communications tab).

Once I found the list view (thanks to Shay how pointed it out) I’ve got the problem that I can’t jump to the last answer in the thread. I always have to start with the first post and scroll down to the last. This is not a big deal on a PC, but it’s quite an act on a smart phone.

Once you go to the next page (‘load more elements or click on the blue arrow beside the page number) in list view you can’t really see which page you are currently on.

If you answer a thread there is no ‘back to list of threads’ near the end of the post. You have to scroll back up and click the bread crumb to go back (OK, scroll all the way back up on my smart phone).

I’m missing some kind of help feature which helps to understand all the new features and icons which are around.

How to use the new editor in an efficient way, format code or quote part of a post (without switching the editor mode)?

How to setup some favorite ‘spaces’ which I read frequently?

I hope the next few days get us some more info how to best tweak the new software in a way we, the users, like to use it.