ADF-BC/JSF Performing case insensitive searches

I have been asked to implement a service request system that will allow a company to record service requests from customer via a telephone line. The difference with oracle's SRDemo application is that in my case SR's will be entered by telephone operators and be assigned to departments and not to technicians

Anyway the application still offers a SRSearch page that allows telephone operators and managers to filter the service request list and here is where my problem started since they asked me if the QBE system would match parts of the requester first or last name case insensitively.My first reaction was to tell them to enter everything in capital letters, but then I though I might give it a try and ended up like this

first I added two additional fields in my query named SearchFirstName and SearchLastName defined like this

  SELECT 
       .....
       ServiceRequest.REQUESTER_FIRST_NAME, 
       UPPER( REQUESTER_FIRST_NAME) AS SEARCH_FIRST_NAME, 
       ServiceRequest.REQUESTER_LAST_NAME, 
       UPPER( REQUESTER_LAST_NAME) AS SEARCH_LAST_NAME, 
       ......

then changed I used JavaScript in the SRSearch page to make sure that whatever the user enters in the SearchFierstName and SearchLastName fields is converted to upper case before posting.

The javascript file itself is as simple as this

/* ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
 * file SRSearchSubmit.js
 * contains code that allows to submit the SRSearch form with the first name
 * and last name fields converted to upercase.
 *
 * Date 03-12-2007
 * ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
 */
 function convert()
 {
    var firstName = document.forms["myADFForm"].elements["myADFForm:searchFirstNameField"].value;
    var lastName =  document.forms["myADFForm"].elements["myADFForm:searchLastNameField"].value;

    document.forms["myADFForm"].elements["myADFForm:searchFirstNameField"].value
      = firstName.toUpperCase();
    document.forms["myADFForm"].elements["myADFForm:searchLastNameField"].value
      = lastName.toUpperCase();

    return true;
 }

No the two final points. First we need to include the javascript file at the top of the page inside a <f:verbatim> tag. Next in order to get the names of the elements right, we need to set the id attribute of both the <h:form> and the <af:inputText> elements.

The page header part of the resulting JSF page looks like this

    <afh:html>
      <f:loadBundle basename="SRKomo" var="res"/>
      <afh:head title="#{res['application.title']}">        
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
        <link href="../css/oracle.css" rel="stylesheet" media="screen"/>
        <f:verbatim>
          <script src="../javascript/SRSearchSumbit.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
        </f:verbatim>
      </afh:head>
      <afh:body>
        <af:messages/>
        <h:form id="myADFForm" onsubmit="convert();">
        ...

And the definitions for the each of th two search fields like this

              <af:panelLabelAndMessage label="#{bindings.AllRequestsListSearchFirstName.label}">
                <af:inputText value="#{bindings.AllRequestsListSearchFirstName.inputValue}"
                              simple="true"
                              required="#{bindings.AllRequestsListSearchFirstName.mandatory}"
                              columns="#{bindings.AllRequestsListSearchFirstName.displayWidth}"
                              styleClass="searchTextField"
                              id="searchFirstNameField">
                  <af:validator binding="#{bindings.AllRequestsListSearchFirstName.validator}"/>
                </af:inputText>
              </af:panelLabelAndMessage>

and that did it.

Notes

• The original info about how to place javascript into a JSF document comes from the Frank Nimphius' Blogbuster article ADF Faces: Submit a form with the Enter key.
• I have found it very easy to understand the HTML produced by the Oracle JSF engine using Firebug. Especially the "Inspect element" function will locate the HTML code of each eleent you click on and that can save you an awfull lot of decoding trouble.