Skip to main content

ADF 11g: Using a List in Query component

When you create a default query component you might miss some of the features that ADF offers to you. One of these is the use of lists in the query component. In this post I'll explain to you how to do that.

First image here is the way a query component displays when you use all the defaults, and do no tweaking at all. Forget that I already changed some attributes so they are not displayed in the query component.

It looks ok, but the user of your application might not be so happy. They have to know the id of all departments. This is fine when you only have a few, but what if you have many ?

Let's try to add a list to the query component.

We have to start with the creation of the lookup item for department name. This can also be used in the actual table showing the results. First we add an entity usage for departments to the employees view object

After this we can add the lookup items.

Now create the list of values. The list of values should be based on the departments name attribute.

On the second tab set the UI hints for the list of values. Be aware of the fact that you can only use a couple of list types that can be used in the query component. For now we pick the combo box with list of values.

The last step in the process is to set the queriable property of the departmentId's (both base and lookup) to false.

When you run the page now, you will see that the contains a nice list with all departments.

You can even invoke a complete List Of Values, when you select 'search...' in the combobox (green area in picture above).


Much better than working with department id's (see the difference with the first picture in this post).

Comments

Unknown said…
Related video demo is here:
http://blogs.oracle.com/shay/2009/12/adf_query_with_parameters_and_1.html

Popular posts from this blog

ADF 11g popup and panelwindow: Open wikipedia in a modal popup.

This post was more or less inspired by the noteWindow example on Oracles tag demo site. When hovering the highlighted text in this example the user gets extra information about the subject. I wanted to give the end user the opportunity to get even more information, for instance by invoking a wikipedia page about the subject. The catch here is that I wanted this information to be shown in a modal popup, and one that is not prohibited by popup blockers. Luckily ADF 11g provides javascript popups that can also be made modal, so the user has to close the popup before returning to the application. This post describes how I used an in a to open the correct wikipedia in a modal popup. Step 1: Create the plain text that invokes the noteWindow. This is taken directly from the mentioned Oracle example. <p style="margin-left:30px;width:500px;margin-right:30px;line-height:16px"> Vultures are scavenging birds, feeding mostly on the carcasses of dead animals...

ADF 11g : Show PDF in a Popup

In one of my previous posts I showed how to use ADF popup components to display external content such as webpages like wikipedia in an inline frame. Based on this post a colleague of mine tried to display a PDF document. That didn't work. In this post I explain how you can use a servlet to open a PDF document in the inline frame. I will not explain how to invoke popups. If you need to know how to do that, refer to the post mentioned earlier. How to create the servlet ? The solution for showing a PDF in a popup is to use a servlet. It's possible to have a servlet deliver PDF content to the browser by specifying the content type of the servlet response to be the 'application/pdf' MIME type via 'response.setContentType("application/pdf")'. In JDeveloper you can create a HTTP servlet very easy via the new gallery. I decided to call the servlet ShowPdfServlet which actually is a pretty descriptive name for this servlet. For the servlet mapping I accept th...

ADF 11g : Printing Directly From Your Application

Last week I was asked this question : "Can we print directly from within our ADF Application, without invoking the printer dialog ?" I wasn't sure but after some investigation the answer was clear. Yes you can ! Here is how... I decided to create a print start up form where I can select printers and print the document. Most of the functionality needed is provided by the Java Print Service API. Selecting available printers I start with a way to show all printers available to the session. For that I simply use the PrinterServiceLookup. PrintService[] printers = PrintServiceLookup.lookupPrintServices(null, null); The result I can now use to create an Array of SelectItems in order to make the list available in the application. 1: public SelectItem[] getAllPrinters() { 2: if (allPrinters == null) { 3: PrintService[] printers = 4: PrintServiceLookup.lookupPrintServices(null, null); 5: allPrinters = new SelectItem[printers.length]; 6: for (int i = 0; i ...