UIX Developer's Guide

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Appendix: Changes Since JDeveloper 9.0.3

This appendix describes changes to UIX since JDeveloper 9.0.3 (which corresponds to UIX 2.1.8 through UIX 2.1.16). It includes the following sections:

• Partial Page Rendering (PPR) Enhancements
• List of Values (LOV) Enhancements
• BC4J Enhancments
• Enhancements to Support for Mobile Devices
• Miscellaneous Enhancements

Partial Page Rendering (PPR) Enhancements

PPR enhancements include the following:

• The <subTabLayout> component has been enhanced to support partial page rendering. When partial page rendering is enabled (partial render mode is set and an ID is specified), the <subTabLayout> component uses partial page rendering to update itself when the user switches between sub tabs.

• The partialRenderMode attribute now supports a new mode which allows multiple partial targets to be registered. When the partialRenderMode is set to multiple, UIX registers any partial targets specified via the new partialTargets attribute. For example, the following sample code shows a hideShow component with multiple partial targets:

    
  <hideShow id="hsID"
              partialRenderMode="multiple"
              partialTargets="target1 target2 target3"/>
  
    <textInput id="target1"/>
    <textInput id="target2"/>
    <textInput id="target3"/>
  

  Note that the ID of the node which triggers the partial page event (in this case, the <hideShow>) is automatically included in the set of partial targets. The new multiple mode and partialTargets attribute are now supported by all components which support the partialRenderMode attribute.

• The <lovInput> component now supports the partialRenderMode and partialTargets attributes. Prior to UIX 2.1.8, partial page rendering was used to send lovUpdate and lovValidate events by default. As of UIX 2.1.8, clients must explicitly set the partialRenderMode to self or multiple to enable partial page rendering for the <lovInput> component.

• The utility method PartialPageUtils.forceRedirectURL() has been added. This method can be called in response to a partial page event to force a redirection to another page. Clients can either call this method instead of rendering a partial page response or can call this method if an error (or Exception) occurs during the partial page rendering pass.

• The utility method PartialPageRendererUtils.supportsPartialRendering() has been added. Clients can call this method to determine whether the partial page rendering is supported by the user agent and accessibility mode for the current rendering pass. Note that in general clients should not need to check whether partial page rendering is supported, since the UIX Renderers automatically detect this and behave appropriately. However, this method is provided for clients who are implementing their own renderers and also to address a specific LovInput scenario.

List of Values (LOV) Enhancements

LOV enhancements include the following:

• The LOV window now comes up on every click of the Search icon. If the value in the input field was changed, a validation event is also generated. In cases where the validation sets showWindow to true, a new window is not displayed, because the open LOV window will have filled the request. If the <lovInput> field is blank, no validation event is generated when the Search is clicked, regardless of the setting of the validateBlanks attribute. (However, a blank field is still validated when validateBlanks is set to true and the user navigates away from the <lovInput> field.)

• In browsers that support the encodeURIComponent() JavaScript call, the inputValue will be encoded using it. This preserves Unicode input values.

• Configuration information is now honored in the LOV window.

BC4J Enhancements

• The value of the control hints Label Text for a BC4J View Object is now used as the default control hint text for field prompts and table header titles.

• <bc4j:table> now supports the showAll attribute, which adds a Show All option to tables. (The <bc4j:table> element inherits the showAll attribute from the UIX Components <table> element.)

• A new <bc4j:formValue> element has been added. This allows you to submit a "hidden" value with a form; that is, the value is not displayed to users.

• The following UIX BC4J components now all default the underlying UIX name attribute to be the same as the attrName attribute:

  messageInput
input
checkBox
choice
dateField
fileUpload
formValue
list
lovField
textInput
  

• UIX runtime now throws a parsing error if a referenced .cpx data definition file is not found.

Enhancements to Support for Mobile Devices

UIX currently supports the following components on the Pocket PC only. In the future, this list of supported components will be the same for all of the PDA-sized devices. Note that not all functionality on every bean is implemented.

• body
• borderLayout
• bulletedList
• button
• cellFormat
• checkbox
• choice
• column
• contentFooter
• dateField
• dataScope
• document
• flowLayout
• form
• formParameter
• formValue
• formattedText
• frame
• frameBorderLayout
• globalButton
• globalButtonBar
• globalHeader
• head
• image
• include
• inlineMessage
• labeledFieldLayout
• link
• list
• lovField
• messageBox
• messageCheckBox
• messageChoice
• messageDateField
• messageList
• messageLovField
• messagePrompt
• messageRadioButton
• messageRadioGroup
• messageStyledText
• messageText
• messageTextInput
• navigationBar
• option
• pageButtonBar
• pageHeaderLayout
• pageLayout
• radioButton
• radioGroup
• rawText
• resetButton
• rowLayout
• servletInclude
• spacer
• stackLayout
• styledText
• submitButton
• switcher
• table
• tableLayout
• textInput
• train
• try
• urlInclude

The following components render nothing themselves, but do render their indexed children:

• header
• hideShowHeader
• subTabLayout
• tip

The following are components which will be implemented in a subsequent release:

• addTableRow
• hideShow
• multipleSelection
• singleSelection
• sortableHeader
• totalRow

The following components are not supported. Neither the component nor its children are rendered and a warning is written to the error log.

• applicationSwitcher
• browseMenu
• contentContainer
• fileUpload
• importScript
• lovInput
• listOfValues
• hGrid
• messageFileUpload
• quickLinks
• shuttle
• sideBar
• sideNav
• styledItem
• styledList
• subTabBar
• tabBar
• tree

The following components are ignored. No warning is written to the log as these should not be essential to the correct behavior of the page.

• breadCrumbs
• footer
• separator
• styleSheet

Miscellaneous Enhancements

Miscellaneous enhancements include the following:

• The <table> component now supports the ability to hide and show all details or hide and show all rows. To turn on having the ability to hide or show all details, set the table's allDetailsEnabled attribute to true. To enable all rows to be shown in the table via the navigation choice, the showAll attribute should be set. For the possible values of this attribute, consult the Table documentation.

• A new <columnGroup> component has been added. This control groups columns in a table so a single header spans all the columns in the group. Multiple <columnGroup>s can be nested.

• A new <contextProperty> element has been added to uiXML. This new UINode element allows you to set RenderingContext properties declaratively.

• The new <set> event handler provides a declarative way to make components on pages fully interactive, by updating a keyed value in a MutableDataObject. For example, if you bind the disclosed attribute of a <hideShow> component and then update it using the <set> event handler in reponse to the hide and show events, a fully interactive <hideShow> is possible without writing any custom Java code.

• A <navigationBar> can now list a delimited number of items, along with Previous and Next buttons for navigating to the previous and next lists of items.

• Versioning support is now provided for UIX installables. UIX now automatically appends an identifier to the file names of the UIX installable JavaScript libraries and the generated CSS style sheets. The identifier uniquely identifies the version of each file, and the identifier is changed whenever a file has been modified since the last release. Changing the file name in this way simplifies the UIX upgrade process, since browsers will automatically detect that a new version of the file is required and will download the latest version from the server.

  Although clients have always been required to upgrade to the latest version of the UIX installable files when upgrading to a new version of UIX, now this requirement is even more critical. Failure to keep the UIX installable files in sync with the version of the UIX classes used by a web application will prevent the UIX JavaScript libraries from being located.

• The media component can now display RealPlayer controls properly.

• PrintWriter performance has been improved by using an unsynchronized private subclass of java.io.PrintWriter. In order to take advantage of this enhancement, clients must avoid calling ServletResponse.getWriter() directly, but instead should allow UIX to create the PrintWriter itself, ideally by using ServletRenderingContext.prepareResponse()