JDeveloper: Fitler Table on Transient Column

This blog entry is based on a question on the JDeveloper and ADF OTN forum. The use case is that a entity (EO) based view object (VO) is shown as a editable table on a page. One column should show a checkbox which is used to select rows on the VO. On an user action, a button pressed in this sample, the selected rows should be displayed in an other table (read only in this case).

We build this use case using JDeveloper 11gR2 (11.1.2.2.0) using the HR schema. As we only want to show how to solve this use case, we only need the ‘Countries’ table. The sample can be downloaded using the link provided at the end of this blog.

There are two problems to solve here:

1. showing a checkbox to select rows
2. filter the second table to only show the marked rows

The solution for the first quest is outlined in ADF Code Corner article 99. Multi Table Row Selection for Deferred Delete by Frank Nimphius. We use a transient attribute on the Countries EO, making sure that the transient radio button is selected

Adding a Transient Attribute

We name the new attribute ‘Selected’ and choose Boolean as type for it. Now open the Counties VO and also add an attribute, this time from the EO

Add Attribute to VO from EO

New Attribute ‘Selected’ in VO

Now open the UI Hints tab and select ‘Check Box’ as ‘Control Type’. You can also add a label to be used for the attribute in the ui.

Set UI Hints

This concludes the first quest in the model layer. The second problem is to only show those rows in a second table which are marked (check box selected) in the first table. For the selection we added a new transient attribute ‘Selected’. This boolean attribute we now use to create a view criteria (VC) to filter the row set.
Open the VO CountrieView and select the ‘Query’ node. Add a VC using the green plus sign, name the VC ‘CountriesSelectedVC’ and select the transient ‘Selected’ attribute to equal ‘true’, which is the value the check box get if it’s marked. It’s essential that we set the ‘Query Execution Mode’ to ‘In Memory’ as the VC uses transient data. The framework give you a warning if you don’t obey this rule.

ViewCriteria to Filter Selected Rows

Now that we are able to filter all rows which have the ‘Selected’ attribute set, we have to set up the application modules data model. We use the CountriesView VO to show all rows including the check box to select some or all rows and use the same CountriesView VO, now with the VC applied, to show only the marked rows.
For this we add the CountriesView VO once to the data model as ‘CountriesView1’ and then add the same VO again to the data model as ‘CountriesViewSelected’. To apply the VC ‘CountriesSelectedVC’we defined earlier, we select the ‘Edit’ button in the top right corner of the data model. In the dialog we select the CountriesSelectedVC VC and shuffle it to the selected side. This adds the defined VC as where clause to the VO.

Add VC to VO

If you run the model project in the application module tester you’ll see that it works as expected.

The final task is to set up the UI. We use a single page and put a splitter onto a panel stretch layout. The top part shows the editable table with the check box, the lower splitter facet the row which are selected in the upper table. The image below shows the running application

Final Application after Start

Select some rows

Some Rows are Selected

After selecting some rows by marking the check box we need to issue an action to see the result. Click the ‘refresh’ button which is bound to the ‘execute’ method of the CountriesViewSelected view from the Data Control. All left to do is to set up a partial trigger in the table showing the selected records pointing to the ‘refresh’ button.

<af:table value="#{bindings.CountriesViewSelected.collectionModel}" var="row"
          rows="#{bindings.CountriesViewSelected.rangeSize}"
          emptyText="#{bindings.CountriesViewSelected.viewable ? 'No data to display.' : 'Access Denied.'}"
          fetchSize="#{bindings.CountriesViewSelected.rangeSize}" rowBandingInterval="0"
          id="t2" partialTriggers="::ctb1">

Now the final result look like

Final Application

You can download the sample workspace, build with JDeveloper 11.1.2.2.0 and depending on the HR db schema, from here: BlogFilterTableOnColumn.zip.doc
Please rename the file to ‘.zip’ after downloading it!

I set up a second version of the sample which uses the toolbar button set to partial submit. At first it looks like the button in the toolbar doesn’t work as there is no change in the selected table section. The problem is that the check box which selects the rows doesn’t auto submit the values. So the query executed by the toolbar button only sees the old marks. If you set the selectBooleanCheckbox autoSubmit property to true it works as expected.
The new version of the sample can be loaded here BlogFilterTableOnColumnV2.zip