Oracle Magazine - May/June 2012

Java Developer
ORACLE ADF BY FRANK NIMPHIUS

Personalized Dashboards

Extend an Oracle ADF Faces dashboard application to
support persistent user personalization.

ORACLE JDEVELOPER AND ORACLE APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT FRAMEWORK

Many enterprise applications being built oday require flexible, dashboard-style presentation of visual data—bar charts, graphs, and the like—showing various levels of information at a glance. Flexibility these days also assumes a certain amount of personalization. Users want to be able to rearrange how the information appears in any dashboard to best suit their needs.

The panelDashboard component of the Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) Faces feature is a JavaServer Faces (JSF) layout container that Oracle ADF developers can use to implement such information dashboards. The panelDashboard component supports various types of child components that can be arranged into columns and rows of equal sizes.

This column will teach you how to change
the Oracle ADF Faces panelDashboard com-
ponent default layout behavior so that users
can reorganize information areas according
to their needs. You’ll also learn how to persist
the user’s changes to the UI beyond the
current session by configuring Oracle Fusion
Middleware’s Oracle Metadata Services (MDS)
feature in conjunction with the Oracle ADF
Security feature so that the user’s personal-
ized UI is displayed whenever that person logs
in. This column steps you through the process
of making the necessary changes to a baseline
application that ultimately supports personal-
ization across application restarts.

Instances of the Oracle ADF Faces af:panelBox component are used as immediate child components of the af:panelDashboard to form a two-row, two-column grid.

To follow the instructions provided in this column, download the o32adf-1549375.zip sample zip file at bit.ly/xfq2gK. The zip file contains two folders:

•;AdfDashboardCompleted contains the Oracle JDeveloper 11 g Release 2 ( 11. 1. 2. 2) workspace for the completed application.

•;AdfDashboardHandsOn contains the starter workspace.

SAMPLE APPLICATION OVERVIEW The sample application workspace contains a panel dashboard page that uses graphs and gauges in the Oracle ADF Faces Data Visualization Tools feature to display salary information in a static grid.

Figure 1: Dashboard starter application

GET TING STARTED

To step through the example, you need the studio edition of Oracle JDeveloper 11 g Release 2 ( 11. 1. 2. 2) or a later release, available as a free download from Oracle Technology Network. You also need an Oracle Database instance with the unlocked HR schema.

To set up and run the example application

1. Unzip the o32adf-1549375.zip file into a directory on your local machine.

2. Launch Oracle JDeveloper 11 g Release 2. From the Oracle JDeveloper menu, select File -> Open and navigate to the directory containing the unpacked sample application.