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Defining column and columnGroup in Advanced Table

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The advancedTable is OA Framework has the option of making a column or columnGruoup as the table columns.
Both, column and columnGroup are container regions and also are indexed children of advancedTable region.

So, what’s the difference between column and columnGroup?

Column: You might have guessed by the name itself that when you define a column in an advanced table then a single column will be generated. The column thus generated is a webbean and can include another webbean of item style like messageStyledText or messageTextInput etc. Also the column has the following properties that can be set at declarative time like column format, column header etc.

In order to create a column just right click on the advancedTable region, select new and then click on column from the context menu.

ColumnGroup: As the name suggests that a columnGroup is a group of columns that can be displayed under one column header. The best part of the columnGroup is that you can create children columns under a columnGroup. These children columns are called as column span. Also one columnGroup can have another columnGroup which in turn can have column as children under it, the columnGroup encapsulates only the column header and the data of the column header and doesn’t encapsulates the columns or columnGroups under it.

In order to create a columnGroup just right click on the advancedTable region and choose new and select columnGroup from the context menu. As soon as you select columnGroup one child column will also be added to the columnGroup by default. Now if you want to add more column or columnGroup to the columnGroup just select the columnGroup and the right click select New and then click on column or columnGroup.

Advanced Table events and their handling

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An advancedTable is capable of HTTP Post opearation hence while creating an advancedTable be sure that it’s a recursive child of the pageLayout region and the “Form” property of the pageLayout region is set to “True”.

All the events generated by advancedTable are HTTP requests are can be caught and handled in processFormRequest method of the controller.

Some of the events of advancedTable can be summarized as below:

Navigation – Occurs when a user clicks on the “next” or “previous” link on the top of the table to navigate to other set of rows than that being currently displayed in the advancedtable region.

Sorting – Occurs when a user selects a highlighted column heading to sort that column in ascending or descending order.

Insertion of a new row – A very important event in advancedTable and it occurs once a user clicks the “Add Another Row” button.

Recalculate column Total – Another important event and this one occurs once a user selects the Recalculate button to update the column total.

Detail Disclosure – this event occurs once the user selects the Hide or Show link to collapse or expand the detail disclosure region.

All the events that get fired by advancedTable can be captured using the hidden fields that are UIX attributes in the UIConstants interface. These hidden fields are parameters that are set once an event is fired by advancedTable region.

The parameters can be summarized as:

SOURCE_PARAM: This parameter designates the event source, in other words, this is the parameter which tells the source from which an event has been fired or generated. It has the name attribute of the webbean that has produced the event.

To check whether the event has been generated by table just refer the lines below

if (tableBean.getName().equals(pageContext.getParameter(SOURCE_PARAM)))

{

….Your business logic to handle the condition

}

EVENT_PARAM: This is the parameter which tell that which event has been generated, the possible list of values that this parameter can have is:

  1. GOTO_EVENT– this is the value of the EVENT_PARAM when a user clicks on the “next” or “previous” link of the advancedTable.
  2. SORT_EVENT: as the name suggests that this value pertains to the event when a user clicks on a sort-able column for ascending or descending order of values.
  3. HIDE_EVENT: EVENT_PARAM attains this value when the “Hide” link of a detail disclosure is selected.
  4. SHOW_EVENT: EVENT_PARAM attains this value when the “Show” link of a detail disclosure is selected.
  5. ADD_ROWS_EVENT: once the user clicks on the “Add Another Row” button the EVENT_PARAM gets this value.
  6. UPDATE_EVENT: The pressing of “Recalculate” button generates this value.
  7. VALUE_PARAM: This is a different type of parameter which tracks the value relevant to a particular event. Let’s discuss this further.
    1. When a hide show in a detail disclosure is selected then this parameter has the value of the row index whose corresponding hide/show link was selected.
    2. When “next” or “previous” link on top of the advancedTable is selected then this parameter has the value of index of the first row that is currently being displayed on the screen e.g. suppose your advanced table displays 12 rows at once, now when the advancedTable region is loaded initially to display the first 12 rows then VALUE_PARAM has the value of 1. Once the next link is clicked and the advancedTable region displays rows from 13 to 24 (if available) then the VALUE_PARAM has the value of 13.

SIZE_PARAM: This parameter indicates the number of rows that are currently being displayed by the table. This parameter gets the value only in the case of navigation event and is applicable to navigation event only.

STATE_PARAM: This parameter is used to indicate the current sorted state of the column, hence applicable only for sort event.

A Small event handling example:

Suppose you want to check if the Add Another Row button has been clicked on the AdvancedTable then you just need to write a code similar to the one shown below:

if (advancedTableBean.getName().equals(pageContext.getParameter(SOURCE_PARAM)))

&& ADD_ROWS_EVENT.equals(pageContext.getParameter(EVENT_PARAM)))

{

.. Your business logic as per the requirement

}

Hope that you find this post to be informative…

Thanks for reading 🙂

Advanced Table Region In OAF

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It was earlier that OA Framework used OATableBean to render tables but
now things have changed and OAAdvancedTableBean extends
OATableBean. The best part of this is that with advancedtable provides declarative support for the functionalities which required programming with simple table.
The magic doesn? ends here, OAAdvancedTableBean also provides declarative support to many of the new features that were not available with OATableBean, just for an example features like column span in a table column header were not available with OATableBean but is now declaratively supported by OAAdvancedTableBean.

Advanced table has many rich features, some of which can be like a table can now have an instruction text and even a tip, also table can have a navigation bar, selection column, add rows button, control bar, recalculate and many more.

Advanced table even allows you to brand the table so that it looks more beautiful once it? displayed. The branding options include:
1. RowBranding
2. ColumnBranding
3. NoBranding
By default ?oBranding?option will be active.

Row Branding: Once you set the branding style in the property palette of advancedTable region and run the page, you will note that the alternative rows of the table are in grey bands of color. Even you have the option to choose the branding interval, by default the branding interval is 1 and hence alternative row is displayed in grey brand color, if you choose 2 as branding interval then the grey band row will appear after every 2 rows.

Column Branding: This is similar to row banding except that now rather that rows the columns of your advanced table will be in the grey band branding style.

No Branding: This is the default branding style that? selected if you don? choose other styles, in this style neither rows nor columns will be branded and all the rows and tables of the advanced table will be displayed as mentioned in Oracle BLAF.

Some more features of advanced table are:

Text: This is the text that will be displayed on the top of the table once the OA Framework page is rendered.

Records Displayed: This property can limit the number of records that can be displayed on the screen once the advanced table is rendered. Be default the number of records displayed is 10.

Width: this is another important property of advancedtable. Here as the name suggests you can enter the width of the table once the table is rendered. You can either enter the width in pixels or in percentage. In order to enter the width of the table in pixel enter 500 or 600 in the property palette. In order to enter the width of the table in percentage enter 70% or 80% in the palette.
Once you enter the width of table to be 100% the navigation links (Next and Previous) will be displayed on top of the table. These links allow you to navigate to the other rows, apart from those being displayed on the OA Framework page currently.

Controller Class: This is an optional property. If you want to perform some runtime action then only you need to create a controller class where you will be handling the events and navigations performed on the advancedTable.

Admin Perosnlization: Set to true if you want the admin to be able to personalize the advancedTable region else false.

User Personalization: Set to true if you want the user to be able to personalize the advancedTable region else false.

Bulleted List In OA Framework

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In oracle application framework page the OAF BulletedList appears with a bullet prefixed to any item present in this region.
For example – Suppose you have 3 items placed inside the BulletedList region type in an Oracle Application Framework page, then all the 3 items will have a bullet attached as prefix when the OA Framework page renders. But the only condition that OAF applies for making the bullet as prefix is that each of the items should have its Rendered property set as true.
Hence, if bullet region is having 4 items in an Oracle Application Framework page and out of these 4 items, 2 items have the rendered property as false then you will find only 2 items with bullet attached to it once the Oracle Apps Framework page renders on the browser.

Generally, Oracle Application Framework uses BulletedList to hold plain texts or links, but this doesn’t means that it cannot hold other regions or items. Oracle Apps Framework gives you the freedom to add any other regions or items inside the BulletedList region style.

Oracle Application Framework allows you to specify the whether you want to show all the items in columns or in the apps framework you can also set the number of rows that you expect to be displayed at runtime.
To achieve the above mentioned functionality Oracle Application Framework provides you the Height attribute property of the BulletedList.
Let’s consider one more example –
Suppose you have 10 items that have to be displayed in 2 columns when the Oracle Apps Framework page is rendered. To make this happen all you need to do is to just set the height property value as 2 in the JDeveloper Tool property palette. This makes the items 1-5 to come in one column and the items 6-10 to be displayed in the second column.
But there is a restriction to the number of columns that you can create with the above approach. As per Oracle Application Framework you cannot exceed the number of columns by 3, this means that you cannot have more than three columns for a BulletedList region in an OAF page.

Corresponding web bean: OABulletedListBean

How to create BulletedList Item in OAF page?
Creating a BulletedList on an Oracle Apps Framework page is simple. Just follow the steps given below.
1. Create a region on an OAF page using JDeveloper
2. Set the style property to BulletedList.
3. Set the properties of the newly created BulletedList region according to the requirement and the standards of Oracle Apps Framework.
4. Create items of any item style as children in this region.

Cell Format Region In OA Framework

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In oracle application framework page the OAF CellFormat region is used inside RowLayout region.

CellFormat region is a container of regions or items.

It imparts the properties like columnSpan, rowSpan, vAlign, hAlign, etc.

Suppose you have 3 rows and 2 columns in a table. Now you want to merge 2 columns of first row.
For this you can use rowSpan property of cell and will get the first of resulting in only one column, i.e. now when you run OAF page, table will have total of 5 cells in it.

CellFormat allows you to control the vertical and horizontal alignment of item present in it. You can achieve the same using vAlign and hAlign.

Suppose there is cell consisting of messageTextInput in it, messageTextInput should be top justified and at the end of the cell in the Oracle application framework page.
For this, set the vAlign (Vertical alignment) property of cellFormat as top and hAlign (Horizontal Alignment) property of cellFormat as right.

Note – It will not take care the alignment of the text of the webbean present in it. Like, in a messageTextInput there is a text of VARCHAR data type, it will be only left aligned.

Corresponding web bean: OACellFormatBean

How to create cellFormat Region in OAF page?
Creating a cellFormat region on an Oracle Apps Framework page is simple. Just follow the steps given below.
1. Create a region on an OAF page using JDeveloper
2. Set the style property to cellFormat.
3. Set the properties of the newly created cellFormat region according to the requirement and the standards of Oracle Apps Framework.
4. Create items or regions of any style as children in this region.