Some More New ADF Features in JDeveloper 11.1.2
- by Steven Davelaar
The official list of new features in JDeveloper 11.1.2 is documented here. While playing with JDeveloper 11.1.2 and scanning the web user interface developer's guide for 11.1.2, I noticed some additional new features in ADF Faces, small but might come in handy:
You can use the af:formatString and af:formatNamed constructs in EL expressions to use substituation variables. For example: <af:outputText value="#{af:formatString('The current user is: {0}',someBean.currentUser)}"/> See section 3.5.2 in web user interface guide for more info.
A new ADF Faces Client Behavior tag: af:checkUncommittedDataBehavior. See section 20.3 in web user interface guide for more info. For this tag to work, you also need to set the uncommittedDataWarning property on the af:document tag. And this property has quite some issues as you can read here. I did a quick test, the alert is shown for a button that is on the same page, however, if you have a menu in a shell page with dynamic regions, then clicking on another menu item does not raise the alert if you have pending changes in the currently displayed region. For now, the JHeadstart implementation of pending changes still seems the best choice (will blog about that soon).
New properties on the af:document tag: smallIconSource creates a so-called favicon that is displayed in front of the URL in the browser address bar. The largeIconSource property specifies the icon used by a mobile device when bookmarking the page to the home page. See section 9.2.5 in web user interface guide for more info. Also notice the failedConnectionText property which I didn't know but was already available in JDeveloper 11.1.1.4.
The af:showDetail tag has a new property handleDisclosure which you can set to client for faster rendering.
In JDeveloper 11.1.1.x, an expression like #{bindings.JobId.inputValue} would return the internal list index number when JobId was a list binding. To get the actual JobId attribute value, you needed to use #{bindings.JobId.attributeValue}. In JDeveloper 11.1.2 this is no longer needed, the #{bindings.JobId.inputValue} expression will return the attribute value corresponding with the selected index in the choice list.
Did you discover other "hidden" new features? Please add them as comment to this blog post so everybody can benefit.
