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Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Oracle Service Bus and JCA Adapters

If you've spent any time using Oracle's SOA suite, the first thing you will notice is their toolset kind of blows donkey. It's a half-baked patchwork of crap - some of it written by them, some of it bought from other companies and bastardized. And chock full of interesting bugs and random crashes.

So the first thing I noticed when working with the OSB for the first time (Oracle Service Bus, a.k.a. BEA Aqualogic service bus, or ALSB) is that the "Workshop" tooling lumps everything as either a "business service" or a "proxy service". That's all fine and good, but when I first started reading about integration patterns, SOA, and service buses years ago, a lot of what I learned about was JCA adapters. Where are the JCA adapters!?

If "Workshop for Weblogic 10g" is your only Oracle SOA IDE, then you might think JCA doesn't exist anymore. Oh, but it does. And chances are you need it. So here comes that patchwork - that menagerie of mismatched pieces. You need to use Oracle JDeveloper as well as Workshop for Weblogic - 2 IDE's to accomplish your 1 task.

Ugh, seriously?

This tutorial and sample, while well written, confirms it in all it's ridiculous glory. You need to launch JDeveloper to create the JCA adapter. Then you launch Workshop for Weblogic and create a business service or proxy service in your OSB project. Within that service, you have to import the WSDL that you generated from JDeveloper (as well as any XSD's and TopLink mappings).

Maybe next time Oracle will put all that into one tool? Though since they bought Sun, they have aquired even more application servers and tools, so next time you'll probably have to launch JDeveloper, Workshop, and NetBeans to get a simple service working.

A Few More SEAM Nuggets

I just came across some stuff that was supposed to be a blog post with some more SEAM tips and tricks. Since then, I've moved on to a new job, and haven't been using SEAM in my new position.

Showing Number of Matched Records in List View

When you generate a SEAM application from a database, you end up with a set of components for each table - for example a list view, record view, and record edit. When you are displaying a list of records, it is common to want to show how many records match the current query (or the total records if you went to list view without a search criteria).

You can easily get this function by accessing the "resultCount" attribute on your view, like this:

<h:outputtext value="#{yourTableList.resultCount} rows found." rendered="#{not empty yourTableList.searchResults}">

Change Default Sort Order, But Still Allow Click-To-Sort

One requirement we ran into on one of my SEAM projects was to change the default sort order for some of the list views. However, the views that the SEAM gen tool creates allows the user to click on the column headers to change sorting as well. To achieve a default sort order on initial load, and still allow clickable headers, override the getOrder() method in your List.java source like this:

@Override
public String getOrder() {
String order = super.getOrder();
if ("".equals(order) || order == null)
{
order = "col1 asc,col2 desc";//your default sort columns here
}
return order;
}