Sometimes you need a small database within your JDeveloper project, but you don't want to install any of the usual suspects like Oracle Database 10g Express Edition or Oracle Lite. If so, Oracle Berkeley DB is an ideal candidate. It's very easy to get started with it inside JDeveloper; just follow the steps below, and you will be up and running in just 15 minutes. Start by downloading the Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition from the OTN:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/berkeley-db/je/index.html
- Create a new Project in JDeveloper
- Create a new Library in the JDeveloper project that contains the lib/je-3.2.44.jar file from the Berkeley DB distribution.
- Save the Project.
- Create a new folder in the file system under the newly created JDeveloper project named: src/collections/hello
- In the file system, copy the file examples/collections/hello/HelloDatabaseWorld.java from the Berkeley DB distribution and put it into the src/collections/hello folder.
- In JDeveloper, refresh the project. The copied file should now appear in the JDeveloper project under Application Sources.
- Create a new directory under your project directory called tmp. This is were the database will reside. If you want to place the database somewhere else, change the line in the HelloDatabaseWorld.java that says:
String dir = "./tmp";
- Run the project inside JDeveloper, the result should be similar to:
Writing data
Reading data
0 Hello
1 Database
2 World
If you want to read more about Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition, please refer to this URL:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/berkeley-db/je/index.html
When talking about rule based programming one often hear that it enables business users and developers to work together. The business users can focus on the business rules part and the developers on the code writing part. This sounds good the first times you hear it, but after a while (at least for me) this sounds perhaps a bit too good to be true. Let me tell you why I believe this to be too good to be true.
If we start to look at the role of the developer; he or she should write the underlying code for the application, and not have to focus on the actual business rules that should be implemented in the system, i.e., should a certain threshold be above or below a certain level, and what should the level be? He should just know that based on this and that data that comes from these and those sources some rules should be applied and then this and that should happen. He should not have to care about exactly what the rules are, how many they are, what thresholds that should be set etc. These things should be left to the business analyst.
The business analyst should on the other hand not have to worry about how to get the data etc, he should just work on the business rules and set the right thresholds that should trigger certain things, for example a discount should be applied for certain customers, but not for others. He should just decide which customers the discount should be applied for and when it should be applied.
Now, don't get me wrong here, I firmly believe that this distinction is good, but I do not believe that it is enough, here are some reasons why:
- The tools requires the business user to be aware of technical issue that he or should not have to be aware of.
- I have not yet seen a tool that is easy enough for a business user to use.
There are further points on my list, but I will stick with these two for the rest of the discussion. This is not just only for our product in this area; this also goes for our competitors.
Normally the rules are stored in a repository, this requires from the end user to be aware of the location, how to open it, how to navigate to right screen, how to alter the rules and/or variables, how to add the syntax for new rules etc. I believe that any business analyst could learn these things, but is this really things that he/she should be focusing his time on? If I would run a business I would rather see them spend time on doing what they to best; not being a part time developer.
I would instead like to see that these things are handled by just a handful of people; I'll call them Business Rules Maintainers. These are the ones who should be working with the deeper maintenance of the rule repository; they could have a Business Analysts background but also needs to be aware of the technical parts of your rule product.
Now, the business analysts still needs to be there, and they need to be able to quickly adapt the rule system to the business, for example, one of you analysts suddenly discovers that a competitor has lowered the levels for being eligible for a discount and you think that this will impact your business if you do not do the same, so the analyst needs to quickly adjust your current discount levels in the system. At this point he should not have to open a full blown rule administration tool for this, he should just have to open a custom GUI in where he could quickly see what the current discount levels are and equally fast alter and save them.
So, to summarize, I believe that when you are designing the system, you should also start to think if your standard rule administration tool is easy enough to use for all your business analysts. If you come to this conclusion, fine. If not, start to think in terms how you could build a custom GUI for your business analysts that they could easy use to quickly tune your business to sudden changes in the environment, and make this GUI as simple as possible to use so that you won't have to turn your analysts into part time programmers. It might not be necessary to incorporate all your rules and threshold variable in this GUI, just the ones that are most critical to your business, and leave the rest to be maintained by the subset of your analysts that are the Business Rules Maintainers.
So to finalize the discussion, I think that when talking about developing and maintaining a rule based system, it is not enough to split the roles into developers and business analysts, I believe that at least one more role is necessary. It could also be that even further roles are necessary, but that is another discussion.
I was asked the other day by a colleague who wanted to get an introduction into Oracle Business Rules if I had some tips & pointers in order to get started, so I thought I'd might put the answer here; perhaps some more people can use it as well.
For a short, but good introduction to what rule based programming is, please check:
http://www.webreference.com/programming/rule/
The article describes short and concise what rule base programming is all about.
OK, so now you know what it is, but how to get started using it? If you are using the Oracle SOA Suite, then you already have a rule engine in place, so why not start using it?
To see a viewlet on how-to use it, go to the Rules section in OTN: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/ias/business_rules/index.html
It is available under the 'Viewlets and Tutorials' section. After that, it is time to start learning more about it.
If you have a developer's background, I would suggest that you start with the 'Oracle Business Rules Language Reference' (available at: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B32110_01/web.1013/b28964/toc.htm), this will give you a feel for how the Rule language works; after all this is really the foundation. When going through this document, you will of course need the API, it's available here: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B32110_01/web.1013/b28966/toc.htm.
The document contains many small examples that will help you to get started and get familiar with the language. The examples are run using a command line interface that ships with the product. An alternative is to download the RulesTools extension for JDeveloper 10.1.3.x. This will give you the option to execute script files written in the Rules Language directly in JDeveloper, as well as some other stuff that will ease programming in the Rules Language.
Once you are familiar with the Rule language, or if you are coming from a more business oriented background, you should start to have a look into the Oracle Business Rules Rule Author; it is the GUI that is used for creating the rules. The documentation for it is available here: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B32110_01/web.1013/b28965/toc.htm.
In the previous given link to the Rules section on OTN you will find even more demos and tutorials to help you get started with the Oracle Business Rules.
I hope this will help you to take your first steps down the road of Oracle Business Rules and rule based programming. Good luck!
Oracle Lite and me have never been friends, but I think that I now have finally beaten the ghost. The background is that I simply wanted to use the OLite in order to do some testing, instead of having run to run a full DB, I wanted to use OLite. So far so good.
I started to configure a DB connection in JDeveloper towards the OLite, and this part went smooth and without problem. Next, I created a small project in JDeveloper based on TopLink and session facade beans. This went fine as well, JDeveloper nicely created my POJO's based on the tables. Finally I created a JSF page to display the data. All in all, the design process went smooth as silk.
The problems started when running the project on the embedded OC4J. All I got was a little error saying:
Internal Exception: java.sql.SQLException: Invalid Oracle URL specifiedError Code: 17067
I performed a few searches on this, but could not really find any useful information, so it was time to start to dig. My first thought was that this was a class loading issue, and that the error was not really the real error; so I added the olite40.jar to about all places that would be relevant for my JDeveloper installation. It did not help; I still ended up with the same error.
Next thought, perhaps the error message was a bit relevant after all, so I added a data-sources.xml file to my project (and an orion-application.xml) to get better control of the data sources. Further, I added a new data source based on the predefined OLite connection and told the session.xml file to use this connection. I did not yet make any further modifications, the new data source was correctly picked up, but I ended up with the same error.
Here was what the original data source looked like:
<connection-pool name="jdev-connection-pool-LocalSoaSuiteOLitee">
<connection-factory factory-class="oracle.jdbc.pool.OracleDataSource"
user="username" password="password" url="jdbc:polite4@localhost:1531:orabpel"/>
</connection-pool>
<managed-data-source name="jdev-connection-managed-LocalSoaSuiteOLitee"
jndi-name="jdbc/LocalSoaSuiteOLiteeDS" connection-pool-name="jdev-connection-pool-LocalSoaSuiteOLitee"/>
I noticed the small piece: factory-class="oracle.jdbc.pool.OracleDataSource", this looked a bit strange to me, so I tested to change this into: factory-class="oracle.lite.poljdbc.POLJDBCDriver" instead, like:
<connection-pool name="jdev-connection-pool-LocalSoaSuiteOLitee">
<connection-factory factory-class="oracle.lite.poljdbc.POLJDBCDriver"
user="username" password="password" url="jdbc:polite4@localhost:1531:orabpel"/>
</connection-pool>
<managed-data-source name="jdev-connection-managed-LocalSoaSuiteOLitee"
jndi-name="jdbc/LocalSoaSuiteOLiteeDS" connection-pool-name="jdev-connection-pool-LocalSoaSuiteOLitee"/>
Once I restarted the project, it all went fine. So, why this did happen after all? Well, it looks as JDeveloper treats an OLite connection as an Oracle connection, so when it generates the data-sources.xml file for the embedded OC4J instance is sets the factory class to what it would be for an Oracle database. With this mind, I can summarize what I did into these steps:
- Add a data-sources.xml file and an orion-application.xml file to the project.
- Create a new data source.
- Change the factory-class to oracle.lite.poljdbc.POLJDBCDriver.
Today I've been doing some tests using MySQL together with the JDeveloper 11 Preview Release. This worked fine, most of the info is covered in the Help chapter, "Working with Non-Oracle Database". However, I missed out one small piece; how to get it to work together with the Embedded OC4J, or rather, where to put the MySQL JDBC JAR file? This as I got an
"Exception: oracle.oc4j.sql.config.DataSourceConfigException: Unable to create : com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
when trying to run my application.
As of JDeveloper 11, a new default directory structure for user-specific content in JDeveloper for Windows is used. The default location for the system subdirectory is now %APPDATA%\JDeveloper\systemXX.XX.XX.XX, where:
- %APPDATA% is the Windows Application Data directory for the user (usually C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data)
- XX.XX.XX.XX is a unique number of the product build, for example, system11.1.1.0.17.45.02
So, in my case, the MySQL JDBC JAR file (mysql-connector-java-3.1.12-bin.jar) should go into the directory:
C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\JDeveloper\system11.1.1.0.17.45.24\o.j2ee\embedded-oc4j\applib
Once I put it there, and restarted the embedded OC4J, it worked fine.
It exists countless articles & blog entries about ADF, however, I have found that quite often do they not exactly cover the exact topic that I am looking for, but, if I combine a few of them they can often together build a solution that is useful for me.
For example, in most cases when you want to display a certain record, the easiest approach if to use a ViewObject with a bind variable and then use the executeWithParams approach, as described in Duncan's blog here:
http://groundside.com/blog/DuncanMills.php?title=executewithparams_my_new_best_buddy&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1
Last week I was assisting one of our partners in a project, and they wanted to display a certain record, but they did not want to use this approach. Instead they wanted to set the selected record based on a parameter sent to the page, and set the record is something like an 'onLoad' event for the page. So, what we did here was to use the processScope variable as described in this article to send the parameter:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jdev/htdocs/partners/addins/exchange/jsf/doc/devguide/communicatingBetweenPages.html
and then combining this with an ADF Page Phase Listener as described here to set the record:
http://groundside.com/blog/DuncanMills.php?title=adf_executing_code_on_page_load&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1
The PagePhaseListener is implemented in the backing bean and this then uses the setCurrentRowWithKeyValue to set the correct row in the iterator, something like:
if (event.getPhaseId() == Lifecycle.PREPARE_MODEL_ID) {
AdfFacesContext afContext = AdfFacesContext.getCurrentInstance();
String myValue = (String)afContext.getProcessScope().get("myKey");
FacesPageLifecycleContext ctx = (FacesPageLifecycleContext)event.getLifecycleContext();
DCIteratorBinding iter = ((DCBindingContainer)ctx.getBindingContainer()).findIteratorBinding("
DepartmentsView1Iterator");
iter.setCurrentRowWithKeyValue(myValue);
}
So, all-in-all, by combining 2 useful articles, I were able to solve the problem, even if no single article covered the problem.
