Customizing JDeveloper Preferences

I like to tweak some of the preferences in the Tools menu of JDeveloper. I thought I would document them here for my own reference and in case anyone else is interested. I'll try to list all the settings I typically change from their default. These are ordered and grouped by their panels in the preferences dialog so you should be able to locate them easily.

• Environment
• Line Terminator to "Line Feed (Unix/Mac)" especially if you are in a mixed environment with windows and linux/mac developers as it prevents a lot of problems if everyone creates the files in the same way.
• Encoding to "UTF-8". I have no idea why the default is platform dependent (MacRoman or some obscure windows code page). I like all developers in the team to use the same encoding. This is also used as encoding in XML files you create. Changing it afterwards can be a lot more work as existing files might need recoding
• Environment > Log
• Maximum Log Lines to something like 50000. The default of 3000 can be too small if you crank up the logging levels in a development session.
• ADF Business Components
• Look at all these settings carefully (and read below). Lots of these settings are used when creating new ADF BC objects so be careful to set these up before you start developing as it can safe a lot of rework later
• ADF Business Components > Base Classes
• You can set the default base classes for any ADF BC object you will create in JDeveloper. It is wise to create company wide extension classes for these and configure JDeveloper to use your company extended classes instead of the JDeveloper base ones. You could even  create a layer of extension classes for your project (extending from company classes) and setup the per-project settings to use these application level extension classes
• ADF Business Components > Packages
• A lot of developers like to group their ADF BC objects per type in separate sub packages. For instance put all view objects in a subpackage .views or .queries. In stead of remembering to set these sub packages each time you are creating ADF BC objects simply set the defaults here.
• ADF Business Components > View Objects
• You could set the default fetching tuning parameters for new view objects here. But in reality they need consideration for each view object you create. One trick we used in the past is to set a ridiculous default value here and then check for that ridiculous value in your extended ADF ViewObject classes. If the developer left the ridiculous initial value simply throw an exception telling the developer to set reasonable values.
• Audit
• The JDeveloper Audit framework is under-appreciated. I would advise to tweak the Code Assist Rules that you see while developing. Go over the rules that are disabled by default and see if you want to enable them. My guess is you can enable most of them, especially to warn developers about missing or incorrect javadoc. Also be sure to check the "Audit During Compile" with perhaps a slightly less restrictive set to prevent your developers from violating certain rules. The next step would be to monitor these quality issues from your continuous build server
• Code Editor > Code Templates
• You can add your own code templates here. We've added a bunch to easily use ADFLogger in your Java source code. More on that in a future post.
• Code Editor > Display
• Enable Text Anti-Aliasing because it just looks better :-)
• Code Editor > Line Gutter
• Enable "Show Line Numbers"
• Code Editor > Save Actions
• These are actions that JDeveloper should perform on each file you save. I typically add "Organize Imports" and "Trim Trailing Whitespace". I've tried using Reformat as well which is great for Java sources which should always be formatted by a tool for consistency. But JDeveloper will then also reformat all XML files including JSF pages. In those files it is much more common to perform manual formatting and I don't like the always-auto-format of these save actions.
• Compiler
• Enable "Clean Project Before Project Rebuild". If you are rebuilding your entire project I see no reason why you don't want to start with a clean project first. Otherwise you might run the risk of keeping compiled artefacts for source objects you have already removed.
• CSS Editor
• If you do anything with ADF skinning be sure to set the CSS level to Level 3 (and on JDev 11gR1) enable the ADF Faces Extensions checkbox
• Debugger
• Check "Show Action Buttons" to get a convenience dropdown list in the log window of JDeveloper to wrap long lines, clear the log, etc.
• Debugger > Beakpoints
• Set the scope for new breakpoints to Global. Especially if you are building on a large system with multiple workspaces. With the default setting your debugger will not stop if you set a breakpoint in one workspace and run the application from another workspace. My workflow is to keep the number of breakpoints limited and I frequently clean them. I would like the confidence that a breakpoint is always used.
• Debugger > Smart Data
• I like to increase the "Number of Lines to Analyze" to something like 5 to show a bit more information in this debugger panel.
• File Types
• I like to change the default editor panel used for certain files. I don't like JSF files to open in design WYSIWYG mode as initialising that editor can be slow. I prefer these to start in source view and I can always switch to the design tab if needed. You can set this in the Default Editors tab of these preferences. I like to set this to "Source" for "HTML Source", "HTML Template", "JSFF Label", "JSP Segment", "JSP Source" and "XHTML Source"
• Web Browser and Proxy
• If your organisation uses a web proxy be sure to fill in these details so JDeveloper can access the internet for things like checking for updates. You can also set you default web browser here in case that is different from the default browser of your operating system. I like to use Google Chrome as my development browser and sometimes you cannot change the default web browser of your operating system due to administrator restrictions.

One final thing I do is to select Tools > External Tools and let JDeveloper create the default external tools when running on Microsoft Windows. This gives you a convenient right-click on all your objects to start a windows explorer in that specific source directory. Something I frequently use, for example to get access to TortoiseSVN on that file. On Mac I like to setup this to run a terminal from the selected directory.

ADF Faces Client Behavior with Attributes

Last month I posted about the basics of creating custom ClientBehavior in ADF Faces. Now it is time to take the next step and enhance that example with ways to set attributes on the JSP client-behavior tag, pass these on to the client-side javascript implementation and use them in the actual functionality.

We'll take the (simplified) example of the previous post that could show a javascript alert and adopt it to get the message from an attribute which we specify in the JSF page using the component. We'll also make sure we can use an EL expression to specify this values (this is the tricky part). We will be able to do something like:

<af:forEach begin="1" end="5" varStatus="vs">
  <af:commandButton text="click to see message #{vs.index}" id="cb">
    <redheap:showAlertBehavior message="This is message #{vs.index}"/>
  </af:commandButton>
</af:forEach>

Custom ADF Faces Client Behavior 11.1.1 JSP tag

This post will show how to create your own ADF Faces client behavior JSP tags which makes them suitable for ADF version 11gR1, also known as version 11.1.1, and version 11gR2 (11.1.2) when not using Facelets.

ADF Faces client behavior tags provide declarative solutions to common client operations that you would otherwise have to write using JavaScript, and register on components as client listeners.

Using tags makes behavior much more reusable. All a page developer has to do is drag-and-drop the client behavior tag on the appropriate component and not worry about writing JavaScript and attaching the appropriate client listeners. ADF Faces 11gR1 has a number of client behavior tags and a couple more were added in version 11.1.2. Some examples are the af:showPopupBehavior to disclose a popup or the af:scrollComponentIntoViewBehavior to scroll the page.

Wouldn't it be great if we can create our own client behavior tags for things that ADF doesn't support out of the box? There are a number of blogs out there that describe something like that, such as placeholder watermarks by Duncan Mills and setting the initial focus component by Donatas Valys. Unfortunately those blogs describe how to do this with facelets which requires JDeveloper 11.1.2 We needed a solution for JDeveloper 11.1.1 and thus JSP tags.

Update: A follow-up post is available that explains how to add support for attributes to your custom client behavior.

Deploy a simple ADF application to Oracle Cloud

I write sample applications to accompany blog posts. You can typically download the project as a zip file or get access to the subversion repository. But I also wanted to make it as easy as possible for people to see the running application. This where the Oracle Cloud comes in. I currently still have a free trial java cloud and this posts explains how I deployed one of the sample applications to that cloud.

First thing you need is the latest version of JDeveloper 11.1.1.6. If you already have JDeveloper installed be sure to check Help > About for the version number. For reasons beyond my comprehension Oracle decided to give the JDeveloper version with cloud support the same version number. The one you need is build 6229 and not the original build 6192:

Performance diagnostics with ADFLogger

This post will show how to use the ADF Logger for performance analysis and how to instrument your own code so it shows up in this analysis. Every ADF developer should know, or learn, about the ADF Logger. If you are new to the logger than read up on it at the official documentation or the great Adventures in Logging series by Duncan Mills.

Configuring Oracle Diagnostic Logging

First thing we need to do is to configure the proper ADF Logger levels as the default levels will only show warning and errors. Run your application so the integrated WebLogic server starts. The log window in JDeveloper will have an Actions pull down menu where you can opt to configure Oracle logging:

configuring Oracle Diagnostic Logging

This will open an editor to the logging configuration file at DefaultDomain/config/fmwconfig/servers/DefaultServer/logging.xml which is typically in JDEV_USER_HOME/system11.1.1.6.38.61.92

SyntaxHighlighter at Blogger

Running a tech/developer blog means I will be posting source code and other technical text. This requires proper syntax highlighting and use of monospaced fonts. Unfortunately blogger.com doesn't really support this out of the box so we need to resort to 3rd parties. Alex Gorbatchev created an awesome syntax highlighter purely in javascript. This means it doesn't need a server side component and we can easily integrate it into blogger.

To integrate SyntaxHighlighter into blogger you have to edit the HTML of your template:

how to get to editing your blogger template

Global DateTimeConverter without separators

We are developing an application where data processing speed is important and users have to enter a lot of dates into the system. This is replacing a legacy Oracle Forms system where people were used to entering dates without any separators. For example they want to enter 120613 for June 12th 2013 (or December 6th 2013 if you're from the US).

ADF Faces (and MyFaces Trinidad) has its own DateTime converter that is already pretty advanced and lenient. You can give it a pattern and it will try to parse any input in several variations of the supplied pattern. For example, both "Jan/4/2004" and "01.4.2004" will be parsed with a pattern of "MMM/d/yyyy". For months it will try MMM, MM and M and it will try any of the separators - or . or /

But we wanted the converter to also try a pattern without any separators. You could specify a secondary pattern for a converter and it will also try to parse any input with this secondary pattern while still using the primary pattern for displaying the date/time. But I don't like the idea of manually setting a secondary pattern on each and every date field in the application.