Skip to main content

JET 4.1 : How to Setup a Functional Application Architecture

This week I had some interesting Oracle JET discussions with a couple of developers at one of our customers. One of the things was regarding the inline use of CSS that I found in the Views of the Modules. I didn't think that made sense so, after asking, I was told that this was because they did not find a way to use specific CSS per module. The question was if it was possible to use one specific CSS per Module in an Oracle JET Application. Besides that I thought it might also be useful to put everything that belongs to a module in its own folder. That could help developers to get a better understanding of the structure of the application. Besides that it is more like the structure of Oracle JET Composite Components where also everything that belongs to that component is under one folder.

Obviously this should be possible by explicitly loading a CSS in the view of the module. Geertjan already blogged about it : https://blogs.oracle.com/geertjan/referencing-css-from-an-oracle-jet-module. The same goes for restructuring the JET application into a more functional architecture: https://blogs.oracle.com/geertjan/restructuring-of-oracle-jet-applications

So nothing really new here, although it is a slightly different approach. Just writing up things here for my own reference. Feel free to use this if you like. In this post I will describe the implementation somewhat more detailed and have a working sample application available.

For this blogpost I used the simple application that can be create on with the Oracle JET CLI. I will show you the steps to go from that to the "alternate" architecture.

The goal is to have all files for one module in one specific folder. The structure is shown in the image below.

Organizing the View and ViewModels.

As you can see from the image, the structure is as follows:  /src/js/modules//
Obviously that mean that for each functional module you have to create a new folder. Not difficult.
Based on the application created with the JET CLI, we need a folder for 'about', 'customers', 'dashboard' and 'incidents'. After these are created, simply move the views and viewModels for each module to their "own" folder.

Next in order to for the application to properly work, there are 2 more changes to be made

  • In main.js change set the proper locations for the viewModels and views




  • In appController.js, change the router as follows:


Easy as that. It works great, and everything fits together.

When you run the application, it will run properly and you have all files related to one Module in one single folder. Which reminds me of the css files.

Organizing the CSS files.

This is easy once you have the folder structure in place. Simply place the css (if any) for the module in the folder and use a STYLE import to make it work:


If you do this for each module, you can even have the same styleClass in every module specific css, with, for instance, a different background color. If you don't need a module specific style, simply don't put the styleClass in the module's css. Just put it in the application specific one. The module will use that one if it does not have it's own version of the styleClass.
For three out of our for modules I added the .epf-home-panel to the 'module specific' css, each with it's own color.


For the 'About' module we don't have that styleClass in the module specific css, so that will use the styleClass as defined in the application specific CSS. That styleClass has the same name, and uses color purple. When you run the application, it will run properly, showing the proper styles, and you have all files related to one Module in one single folder.





That's all.  The sample code can be downloaded from my GIT repo.

Comments

Unknown said…
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

Popular posts from this blog

ADF 12.1.3 : Implementing Default Table Filter Values

In one of my projects I ran into a requirement where the end user needs to be presented with default values in the table filters. This sounds like it is a common requirement, which is easy to implement. However it proved to be not so common, as it is not in the documentation nor are there any Blogpost to be found that talk about this feature. In this blogpost I describe how to implement this. The Use Case Explained Users of the application would typically enter today's date in a table filter in order to get all data that is valid for today. They do this each and every time. In order to facilitate them I want to have the table filter pre-filled with today's date (at the moment of writing July 31st 2015). So whenever the page is displayed, it should display 'today' in the table filter and execute the query accordingly. The problem is to get the value in the filter without the user typing it. Lets first take a look at how the ADF Search and Filters are implemented by...

ADF 11g Quicky 3 : Adding Error, Info and Warning messages

How can we add a message programatically ? Last week I got this question for the second time in a months time. I decided to write a short blogpost on how this works. Adding messages is very easy, you just need to know how it works. You can add a message to your faces context by creating a new FacesMessage. Set the severity (ERROR, WARNING, INFO or FATAL ), set the message text, and if nessecary a message detail. The fragment below shows the code for an ERROR message. 1: public void setMessagesErr(ActionEvent actionEvent) { 2: String msg = "This is a message"; 3: AdfFacesContext adfFacesContext = null; 4: adfFacesContext = AdfFacesContext.getCurrentInstance(); 5: FacesContext ctx = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance(); 6: FacesMessage fm = 7: new FacesMessage(FacesMessage.SEVERITY_ERROR, msg, ""); 8: ctx.addMessage(null, fm); 9: } I created a simple page with a couple of buttons to show the result of setting the message. When the but...

ADF 12c : Using Jasper Reports en JasperSoft Studio 6.1; What Libraries do you need?

Over the last couple of years, or better in the last decade I have implemented several reporting solutions with Jasper Reports in ADF. I did that in ADF 10g, ADF 11.1.1.x, ADF 11.1.2.x and ADF 12.1.x I also used several version of Jasper Reports. There is a whole lot of documentation, blogposts and presentations available. So when today I got a request from one of my customers to make a setup for the implementation of Jasper Reports 6.1 in ADF 12.1.3 I did not expect any problems. Boy was I wrong. Here is the Story With all the knowledge from the past, I decided to follow the known steps. 1) Download iReport Designer, 2) Build a report in iReport 3) Create an ADF application 4) Add the necessary libraries to use the report 5) Call the report from a button via a Managed Bean Step 1 In the past I used iReport designer to build the reports. When you go to the download site of iReport designer you now see an interesting message. So I took this serious and decided not to u...