Oracle Magazine - May/June 2012

selected in the Structure window, open the Property Inspector by selecting View -> Property Inspector from the Oracle JDeveloper menu.

5. In the Panel Dashboard—Property Inspector pane, click in the Find field (next to the magnifier icon) to activate the search input field.

6. Type DropListener in the search field. As you type, the DropListener attribute becomes highlighted (in the Behavior section of the Property Inspector pane).

7. Select Edit from the DropListener property menu. The Edit Property: DropListener dialog box appears.

•;Select DndHandlerBean from the menu as the managed bean for the listener.

•;Select dashBoardDropHandler as the
method.

8. Click OK to save the setting.

Upon drop event notification, the managed bean identifies the change in the panelDashboard child component order and writes this change to the Oracle ADF Faces change persistence framework, which passes this information on to MDS as per the configuration in the adf-conf.xml file.

For a better understanding of using Java to access the Oracle ADF Faces change persistence API, take a look at the code that constitutes the DndHandlerBean. From the Application Navigator, go to the ViewController -> Application Sources folder, in the oramag.sample.dashboard.view .beans.dashboard package.

At this point, you’ve implemented drag-and-drop for the panelDashboard component, so your application users can reorder child components at runtime. You’ve also set up MDS to persist changes to specific UI components. The one task remaining is to set up Oracle ADF Security to enforce user authentication so that UI changes can be saved for each user.

SE T TING UP ORACLE ADF SECURI T Y AND TES TING THE COMPLETED APPLICATION When users access the dashboard from their browser, you want them to be prompted for a username and password. Implementing this in the sample requires configuring Oracle ADF Security in a simple wizard-driven process. From the Oracle JDeveloper menu,

1. Select Application -> Secure -> Configure ADF Security to launch the Oracle ADF Security wizard. The Enable ADF Security pane (step 1 of 4) appears, enabling you to choose the type of authentication.

2. Click ADF Authentication (in the Security Model section), and click Next to continue. By default, ADF Authentication has Http Basic Authentication selected as its type on the next pane (step 2 of 4) of the wizard.

3. Leave Http Basic Authentication selected, and click Finish to save the settings and complete the wizard. A “Security Infrastructure Created” message appears.

4. Click OK to dismiss the message.

With Oracle ADF Security enabled for authentication, you can now create some test users. From the Oracle JDeveloper menu, select Application -> Secure -> Users. Click the green plus (+) icon in the Users section of the dialog box for adding users, and create the test user accounts listed in Table 1.

When you have finished adding these test users, click the save icon in the Oracle JDeveloper tool bar to save your work.

You can now run the completed dashboard application with some real-world personalization scenarios. Run the application by right-clicking the DashBoardPage .jspx file in the Application Navigator pane and selecting Run from the context menu. In the browser’s login dialog box, authenticate as test user sking (sking/welcome1).

Rearrange the panel boxes by dragging and dropping them to new locations within the dashboard. (You’ll notice that the dashboard functionality itself hasn’t changed— the graph and the gauge are updated as they should be, and the result data in the two graphs at the bottom of the UI remains static.) When you’ve sufficiently modified the order of the UI items, close the browser.

Now rerun the application. Note that you
can quickly restart the application from the
Oracle JDeveloper log window, which contains
the runtime URL, similar to the following:
http://localhost:7101/PanelDashboard-
ViewController-context-root/faces/
DashBoardPage.jspx
Open the log window if necessary by
selecting View -> Log Window from the
menu, and click the URL to rerun the dash-
board application.

CONCLUSION

This column has stepped you through the process of using Oracle JDeveloper’s declarative and visual tools to support persistent personalization of UI elements in a dashboard application. You can see how the combination of Oracle ADF Security for user authentication, Oracle ADF Faces behavior tags for implementing drag-and-drop, and the integrated change persistence framework in Oracle ADF Faces enable application developers to build personalizable application user interfaces with almost no need to write code. 

Frank Nimphius is a senior principal product
manager for Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle
Application Development Framework. He is
a coauthor of Oracle Fusion Developer Guide:
Building Rich Internet Applications with Oracle
ADF Business Components and Oracle ADF
Faces (McGraw-Hill, 2010).