Wednesday 19 November 2008

GoogleEarth 4.3: How to change the GUI fontsize in Linux

Just installed GoogleEarth version 4.3 on my CentOS 5.2 machine today.

The installation finished without any errors but the font the GUI started with was a complete disaster. It was so small I could not read it. A little bit of googling revealed the following:

  1. GoogleEarth 4.3 stores it's configuration in the ~/.config/Google directory.
  2. Inside it, the file GoogleEarthPlus.conf contains a section called [Render].
  3. The render section contains attributes for GuiFontFamily and GuiFontSize. Place the right values over there, restart googleearth and that does it.

Thanks to Santana for posting it.

Tuesday 11 November 2008

JavaScript: Dynamically changing CSS properties of any DOM object

I was trying to create a web album the other day and played around with the gThumb image program. The program offers various templates that allow you to create web galleries with various different styles and it turned out that for me, the BestFit template was the best looking of them all.

The interesting part of the story is that when you create a web gallery based on the BestFit template, you also get a number of JavaScript files containing various programming goodies like the get and set property functions that I am displaying on this post. The copyright of these functions is Copyright (C) 2005-2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc., thus my thanks here go to Rennie deGraaf who provided both the template and the opportunity to get access to these functions.

So changing the width, height, or display mode of any DOM object found in your web page has never been so simple.

// set a property to a given value on an object
function setProperty ( obj, prop, val )
{
    if (obj.style.setProperty) // W3C
        obj.style.setProperty(prop, val, null);
    else // MSIE
        eval("obj.style." + prop + " = \"" + val + "\"");
}
 
// gets a style property for an object
function getProperty ( obj, prop )
{
    if (document.defaultView && 
        document.defaultView.getComputedStyle) {
        var val = document.defaultView.getComputedStyle( obj, 
                    null).getPropertyValue(prop)
        if (val)
            return val;
        else
            return eval("document.defaultView.getComputedStyle(obj,null)." + prop);
    }
    else if (window.getComputedStyle) // Konqueror
        return window.getComputedStyle(obj,null).getPropertyValue(prop);
    else if (obj.currentStyle)        // MSIE
        return eval('obj.currentStyle.' + prop);
}

Thursday 23 October 2008

Oracle IAS 10g 10.1.3.x Mapping j2ee security roles to OID groups

Today I feel like I have touched down the deepest bottom of applied j2ee. I have spend two hours trying to figure out why mapping of j2ee application roles -- defined in `/META-INF/jazn-data.xml -- to Internet directory groups did not work and all it required was just to restart the OC4J instance. And although I knew the peeps in a Jeep joke, it took me two hours to finally get out and back in again, i.e. do the restart and get over with it.

To be honest, I have always wanted to do that simply by matching j2ee roles and OID groups and then use something as simple as my UserInfo bean to determine allowed user actions. The truth of the matter is that until today I always gave it up after running into the 403 Forbidden reply from Apache popping out after accessing the application..

Anyway, enough with grumbling, my advice to anyone interested in performing the same is: Just when you think you 've finished changing the applications security provider, setting up mappings and deploying the application do a final restart to the instance.

Wednesday 15 October 2008

Oracle ADF: Verifying Master-Detail relationships and throwing exception on "beforeCommit()" events

I have found no other way to validate master detail hierarchies, than using theEntityImpl.beforeCommit(TransactionEvent transactionEvent). Writing a validateEntity() function can only prove useful when examining the fields of the current record. There are cases however where you need to verify that the entire tree is correct. Consider for instance a cases where you need to verify that all items included in an order are eligible for seeding to the user's dispatch address. For cases like this you need to examine your data just before committing and the beforeCommit() does just that.

During before commit you can practically traverse your entire M/D tree using association accessors and verify that everything meets you business rules.

If anything fails to validate then raising a JboException will prevent the actual commit and the exception error message will appear on your tag in your jspx page. There is however only one small catch:

Unless you modify your application module configuration and set the jbo.txn.handleafterpostexc to true, all exceptions thrown inside the afterCommit() method result in a roll-back which completely destroys the data hierarchy just build. As Steve Muench puts it,

When this flag is true, the framework will take an in-memory snapshot of the pending state of the application module, and then use this snapshot to reinstate that same pending state in case any of the beforeCommit() methods fail with an exception. If everything goes successfully with no errors, the in-memory snapshot is not used and will just get garbage collected.

To change the jbo.txn.handleafterpostexc parameter, right click on your application module inside the application navigator, then select Configurations... from the pop-up menu, click the Edit button from the resulting dialog box and you are there.

Monday 11 August 2008

Oracle Database : Space used in the flash recovery area

Here is a small script adopted from the book "RMAN Recipes for Oracle 11g" by Darl Kuhn, Sam R. Alapati and Arup Nanda. This script when run in from SQL Plus, will display the amount of used space in the current database flash recovery area.

SET PAGESIZE 66;
SET LINESIZE 80;

REPHEADER PAGE CENTER 'Flash Recovery Area Usage';

COLUMN FILE_TYPE FORMAT a20;
COLUMN FILE_TYPE HEADING 'File Type';

COLUMN USED_MB HEADING 'Used MBytes';
COLUMN USED_MB FORMAT 999999.99;
COLUMN RECLAIMABLE_MB HEADING 'Reclaimable Mbytes';
COLUMN RECLAIMABLE_MB FORMAT 9999999.99;

COLUMN NUMBER_OF_FILES HEADING 'Number of files';

BREAK ON REPORT
COMPUTE SUM LABEL 'Totals:' OF USED_MB RECLAIMABLE_MB ON REPORT;

SELECT
  rau.file_type,
  rfd.space_used * rau.percent_space_used / 1024 / 1024 as USED_MB,
  rfd.space_reclaimable * rau.percent_space_reclaimable / 1024 / 1024 as RECLAIMABLE_MB,
  rau.number_of_files as NUMBER_OF_FILES
FROM
  v$recovery_file_dest rfd, v$flash_recovery_area_usage rau;

Hre is a sample output run against a newly created 11g database

                            Flash Recovery Area Usage

File Type            Used MBytes Reclaimable Mbytes Number of files
-------------------- ----------- ------------------ ---------------
CONTROL FILE              716.17                .00               1
REDO LOG                11649.70                .00               3
ARCHIVED LOG            31957.11             391.11              10
BACKUP PIECE            79272.10                .00               2
IMAGE COPY                   .00                .00               0
FLASHBACK LOG                .00                .00               0
FOREIGN ARCHIVED LOG         .00                .00               0
                     ----------- ------------------
Totals:                123595.09             391.11

The concept is very simple. Oracle provides two views for retrieving information about the flash recovery area. One is the v$recovery_file_dest that contains information about the flash recovery area associated with the current database. A select * on this view will give us an output like the following :

SQL> select * from v$recovery_file_dest;

NAME
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SPACE_LIMIT SPACE_USED SPACE_RECLAIMABLE NUMBER_OF_FILES
----------- ---------- ----------------- ---------------
/u01/app/oracle/flash_recovery_area
 2147483648 1668797952          93845504              16

This view provides the total number of used and reclaimable bytes from the flash recovery area. The next view named v$flash_recovery_area_usage, provided percentage information about each type of file that can be stored in the flash recovery area. Doing a select * on this view gives up the following results.

SQL> set linesize 100;
SQL> select * from v$flash_recovery_area_usage

FILE_TYPE            PERCENT_SPACE_USED PERCENT_SPACE_RECLAIMABLE NUMBER_OF_FILES
-------------------- ------------------ ------------------------- ---------------
CONTROL FILE                        ,45                         0               1
REDO LOG                           7,32                         0               3
ARCHIVED LOG                      20,08                      4,37              10
BACKUP PIECE                      49,81                         0               2
IMAGE COPY                            0                         0               0
FLASHBACK LOG                         0                         0               0
FOREIGN ARCHIVED LOG                  0                         0               0

... so the next logical thing in order to get something meaningful out of these is to join them and this is what the initial script does. Since the v$recovery_file_dest view has only one column, all columns of the v$flash_recovery_area_usage view refer this hence the no need for a where clause in the script's sql.

Friday 18 July 2008

Oracle ADF/ JSF: Mind your flags!

I do not know why JSF UI elements have a Disabled property. I mean I would prefer it if they instead offered an Enabled one. ADF bindings on the other hand have enabled properties, so UI tags usually look this :

<af:commandButton actionListener="#{bindings.Create.execute}"
                     text="#{res['commands.create']}"
                     disabled="#{!bindings.Create.enabled}"
                     action="addEdit"/>

How imagine having to wire in the UserInfo bean, I was talking about the other day. Ideally you would like to have the above Create button enabled when your user is an administrator i.e. #{UserInfo.admin == true} and when the Create binding is enabled, meaning #{bindings.Create.enabled == true}.

Since we now have a Disabled property, this means that the value assigned should be the opposite of #{UserInfo.admin == true && bindings.Create.enabled == true}. The EL expression for this is #{!(UserInfo.admin == true && bindings.Create.enabled == true)}. Using De Morgan's low we end up with #{!UserInfo.admin || !bindings.Create.enabled}.

I understand that for most people this is more than trivial, but I have to admit that is took me a good while to figure it out. (Does age come at a price or what?) I want to learn by my own mistakes. Therefore I thought I 'd put it down in witting, so I won't run into this again.

Tuesday 15 July 2008

Oracle ADF: Viewlink based attributes vs Full Blown Queries

At one time or an other all of us must have dealt with an entity based View object whose SQL statement looked more or less like this :

SELECT UserInfo.USER_ID,
      UserInfo.USER_NAME,
      UserInfo.FULL_NAME,
      UserInfo.USER_ROLE,
      UserInfo.DEPARTMENT_ID,
      UserInfo.ACTIVE,
      Department.NAME,
      Department.ID
FROM USERS UserInfo, DEPARTMENTS Department
WHERE UserInfo.DEPARTMENT_ID = Department.ID (+)

This kind of VO may appear easy to create and manage when your schema contains two or three entities but things may end up pretty complicated as the number of associated entities increases. Let me show you the SQL statement of a view object displaying my version of the Service requests view in full detail.

  SELECT
      ServiceRequest.ID,
      ServiceRequest.REQUEST_DATE,
      TRUNC(REQUEST_DATE) AS SEARCH_DATE,
      ServiceRequest.REQUESTER_FIRST_NAME,
      upper( REQUESTER_FIRST_NAME) AS SEARCH_FIRST_NAME,
      ServiceRequest.REQUESTER_LAST_NAME,
      UPPER( REQUESTER_LAST_NAME) AS SEARCH_LAST_NAME,
      ServiceRequest.REQUESTER_TELEPHONE,
      ServiceRequest.LOCATION_STREET,
      ServiceRequest.LOCATION_NUMBER,
      ServiceRequest.LOCATION_AREA,
      ServiceRequest.LOCATION_ZIP,
      ServiceRequest.LOCATION_CITY,
      ServiceRequest.DEPARTMENT_FOR,
      Department.NAME AS DEPARTMENT_NAME,
      ServiceRequest.ASSIGNED_DATE,
      ServiceRequest.ASSIGNED_TO,
      AssignedTechnician.FULL_NAME AS TECHNICIAN_NAME,
      ServiceRequest.RESOLUTION_COMMENTS,
      ServiceRequest.REQUEST_STATUS,
      Status.NAME AS STATUS_NAME,
      ServiceRequest.PROBLEM_DESCRIPTION,
      AssignedTechnician.USER_ID,
      ServiceRequest.CREATED_BY,
      ServiceRequest.CREATED_ON,
      ServiceRequest.MODIFIED_BY,
      ServiceRequest.MODIFIED_ON,
      ServiceRequest.RESOLVED_ON,
      Department.ID AS ID1,
      Status.STATUS_ID,
      ServiceRequest.TELEPHONE_BY,
      TelephonedOperator.FULL_NAME AS TELEPHONE_OPERATOR_NAME,
      ServiceRequest.TELEPHONE_DATE,
      TelephonedOperator.USER_ID AS USER_ID1
 FROM
   SERVICE_REQUESTS ServiceRequest,
   DEPARTMENTS Department,
   STATUSES Status,
   USERS AssignedTechnician,
   USERS TelephonedOperator
 WHERE 
  (ServiceRequest.DEPARTMENT_FOR = Department.ID (+)) AND
  (ServiceRequest.REQUEST_STATUS = Status.STATUS_ID) AND
  (ServiceRequest.ASSIGNED_TO = AssignedTechnician.USER_ID(+)) AND
  (ServiceRequest.TELEPHONE_BY = TelephonedOperator.USER_ID(+))

When dealing with pure entity based view objects -- that is without a custom where clause -- then JDeveloper makes some descent effort in keeping your where clause straight. If you decide to add bind variables however, then JDeveloper completely looses it and you end up having to manage everything by hand. Where clauses have to be tampered with if you also decide that you need outer left joins and you cannot get away without using the primary keys of all the participating entities and then having to learn how to hide them.

I am never too happy when dealing with such monsters but users are always hungry for more and more information. I guess that this why every self respecting SAP table has at least 70 or more columns :-) ....

Anyway the thing that triggered my search for alternatives was the fact that on many occasions the reference fields of multi entity view objects would not update their values correctly especially after edits, until you issued a final commit, thus giving users one more reason to grumble. So instead of using the SQL query mode, I ended up using view link based transient attributes.

The idea is very simple. Create single entity based view objects containing all the relevant information. In our example Users and Departments. Then create a view link between the two and expose accessors to the client. Enable Java code generation for the primary view row. Last create a transient attribute to the source View (Users) that exposes the department name through the view link provided departments row member.

Let's follow the steps in more details....

For starters we can create two view objects UsersFullList and DepartmentsList with SQL statements like the following :

SELECT UserInfo.USER_ID,
      UserInfo.USER_NAME,
      UserInfo.FULL_NAME,
      UserInfo.USER_ROLE,
      UserInfo.DEPARTMENT_ID,
      UserInfo.ACTIVE
FROM USERS UserInfo

... for the Users View and ...

SELECT Department.ID,
      Department.NAME,
      Department.IS_TECH
FROM DEPARTMENTS Department

... for the departments. If you do not intend to edit Departments through your application, you may very well create a read only view object. Next we shall create a view link named UserAssignedToDept . Creating the view link is trivial, so I will show only you the images where we define the connection ....

and the view link properties :

The important thing to remember here is that since the view link cardinality is set to 1 → ∞ the department accessor will be of type Row instead of RowIterator. So if we next edit the UsersFullList view and create a Java class for the view row, then the code for the DepartmentInfo attribute will look exactly like this :

   /**Gets the associated Row using master-detail link DepartmentInfo
    */
   public Row getDepartmentInfo()
   {
       return (Row)getAttributeInternal(DEPARTMENTINFO);
   }

Creating a department name attribute for the the new view is now done by defining a transient attribute to the UsersFullList view

and then providing a getter method that looks like this :

   public String getDepartmentName()
   {
       String deptName;
       try {
           Row deptRow = this.getDepartmentInfo();
           deptName = (String )deptRow.getAttribute("Name");
       } catch (Exception e) {
           deptName = "";
       }
       return deptName;
   }

From the controller's side the view object looks exactly like it would if based on SQL and you don't have to hide the participating entity key attributes.

So is it worth it you might ask. The answer is -- as usually -- yes and no depending on the size of your project the complexity of your view objects and whether or not you prefer tampering with SQL code than Java. As I explained in the beginning of this posting the main advantage of this method is that your reference attributes will always display correctly since they are composed of pointers to the actual data of the view cache instead of cached entries. On the other hand if you project contains two view objects each composed from two entities, going through all that will be like killing a fly with a machine gun.

Friday 11 July 2008

Oracle ADF: My simple UserInfo bean class

Some time ago, I posted a link to the JDeveloper forum regarding how to use he isUserInRole() method of the ExternalContext class in order to determine whether or not the current application user is assigned a role.

Since I have lost the original post, I am giving to display sample code showing how to reference the function, how to declare the bean in faces-config.xml and also how to use it.

Let's suppose that you our application has two roles. User and admin. Definitions ofr these roles is included in jazn-data.xml.

package mycompany.myapplication.view.beans;

import javax.faces.context.ExternalContext;
import javax.faces.context.FacesContext;

public class UserInfo {
   
    private boolean admin;
    private boolean user;

    public UserInfo()
    {
        FacesContext fc = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance();
        ExternalContext ec = fc.getExternalContext();
        
        user = ec.isUserInRole("user");
        admin = ec.isUserInRole("admin");
    }
    
    public boolean isUser()
    {
        return user;
    }
    
    public boolean isAdmin()
    {
        return admin;
    }
}

The next step is to define the bean in faces-config.xml

  <managed-bean>
    <managed-bean-name>UserInfo</managed-bean-name>
    <managed-bean-class>mycompany.myapplication.view.beans.UserInfo</managed-bean-class>
    <managed-bean-scope>session</managed-bean-scope>
  </managed-bean>

Finally enabling or disabling a menu item property based on whether the user is an admin, is done like this

             <af:commandMenuItem text="#{res['menutabs.AdminAction']}"
                                    action="adminAction"
                                    disabled="#{!UserInfo.admin}"/>

By the same token preventing a page from being display is done like this

          <af:panelPage title="#{res['pages.pricelist.BasicFees.title']}"
                        rendered="#{UserInfo.admin}">

The truth of the matter is that I ended up using all that because I could not succeed in making j2ee security work for my application. Despite Chris Muir's hints on the JDeveloper forum, there was no way I could deny access to certain parts of my application, so I ended up enforcing security using my simple UserInfo bean that I hooked into the disabled and rendered properties of menu and panelPage tags of the protected pages like I showed before.

That way if anyone runs the application by going from the standard path, then he won't be able to access the admin pages and if he calls the pages directly, then he will see nothing.

Thursday 3 July 2008

Oracl;e SQL Developer: Unable to dubug PL/SQL

I have to thank Brian from Oracle support for this one, but let me first give you the story.

If you are trying to debug PL/SQL using Oracle SQLDeveloper 1.5.1 and getting an like this :

then you are probably facing one of two options :

  • You are trying to access you database server from a machine getting its address from DHCP. In that case you will need to supply your ip address each time your start a debugging session. This is accomplished by checking the Prompt for Debugger Host for Database debugging checkbox in the Debuger page of the preferences dialog as shown in the image below.
  • The other option is that your machine firewall is blocking access to the debugging process between your machine and the DB server. In that case you need to reconfigure SQL Developer to use a speciffic port range and also have the firewall allow traffic through these ports.
    In my case all I had to do was change my debugger preferences so the dialog page looks exactly like this :

    and also change my firewall setup to allow access through port 4000.

One final comment. When I run into this problem and asked for help, deep inside I was already blaming my unsupported CentOS Linux version. I had already run into the same problem with my openSUSE machine and found no way out. As it turned out the solution was not machine or distro specific but rather platform independent. So next time, I promise to have a little more faith in my own devices,

Now SQLDeveloper 1.5.1 runs very nicely on both machines at home and at work, and me having regained my trust on the platform, I even run it using the 64 bit 1.6.0_06 JDK. To be honest I haven't seen any real changes in terms of speed, but I tell myself that now I can savour one more taste of the 64 bit glamour. ;-)

Thanks again Brian.

Wednesday 2 July 2008

PHP: Number of rows from query

The idea comes from the developers of Oracle ADF, I have seen it work on JDeveloper and I thought that I can use it in PHP. The trick here is to place the entire query inside a SELECT count(*) from ($query) statement.

Once you know what to do implementation is as easy as witting the code below. The only comment is that the function references an already initialized external mysqli class variable that connects to the database, which if you feel like it may also be passed as a function parameter.

    /**
      * returns the number of records  of the query passed as parameter 
      */
    function numRecordsOfQuery( $a_query) 
    {
        global $mysqli;

        $count_query = " 
                   SELECT count(*) as TotalLines 
                     FROM ($a_query) MyQuery";
        $result = $mysqli->query($count_query);
        // echo $count_query;
        $row = $result->fetch_array( MYSQLI_ASSOC);
        $numRecords = $row['TotalLines'];
        $result->close();
        
        return $numRecords;
    }

Note The MyQuery references is mandatory. MySQL will return an error if the enclosed query is not referenced.

Wednesday 18 June 2008

CentOS: Manual install of plugins for Mozilla Firefox

This is just a note to myself and everyone else in the same spot.

Flash Player

Manual installation of the Flash player plugin for a new Firefox installation is done like this :

[root@lxbakalidis ~]# cd /opt/mozilla/firefox/plugins
[root@lxbakalidis plugins]# ln -sf /usr/lib/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so 
libflashplayer.so

Detailed instructions for installing flash-player from Adobe are available here.

Java

The java plugin gets installed by linking libjavaplugin_oji.so located in $JAVA_HOME/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/ in your plugin dir.

Real Player

For real Player the plugin name is nphelix.so and the plugin location is /opt/RealPlayer//mozilla/.

Friday 30 May 2008

Oracle ADF: Enriching the actions of a ViewObject

Based on the technique described two posts back regarding creation of a custom ViewObject that offers ready to drag actions, I now give you another simple yet very handy function. The showAllRows() function when added to the AB_BaseViewObject methods, allows you to create a button in a search page that removes all view criteria and executes the current query, very useful for cases when uses enter lots of view criteria and then need to display the entire contents of the entire row with a single click.

    public void showAllRows()
    {
        clearViewCriterias();
        executeQuery();
    }

Remember that in order for the action to appear in the JDeveloper Data Control Palette like in the following picture, you must include the showAllRows() function to the view objects client interface.

Wednesday 21 May 2008

Oracle ADF: Duplicating a ViewObject's current row

I wanted to add a Create Like functionality that would allow a new row to be inserted in a ViewObject then drive the user to an edit page where he or she would make ant changes required for valid insertion of the new row to the database and avoid having to re-enter everything from scratch.

In order to accomplish this I created the following method in the ViewObject's implementation class.

import oracle.jbo.AttributeDef;
import oracle.jbo.Row;
import oracle.jbo.ReadOnlyAttrException;
import oracle.jbo.TooManyObjectsException;

. . .

    /**
     * create and insert a row similar to the current
     */
    public void createLike()
    {
        // get the current row to dublicate
        Row currentRow = getCurrentRow();
        if (currentRow == null)
            return;
            
        // create new one
        Row newRow = createRow();
        
        // get the attribute values for the current attribute
        Object[] myValues = currentRow.getAttributeValues();
        
        for (int i = 0; i < currentRow.getAttributeCount(); i++)
            try {
                AttributeDef d = getAttributeDef(i);
                    
                if (d.getUpdateableFlag() != AttributeDef.READONLY)                
                    newRow.setAttribute( i, myValues[i]);                
            }    
            catch (ReadOnlyAttrException roe) {
                continue;
            }
            catch (Exception e) {
                // it is almost certain that the primary key will be
                // violated so the user must do something in the 
                // page following execution of the method.
                if (!(e instanceof TooManyObjectsException))
                    System.out.println(e.toString());
            }
            
        insertRow(newRow);        
    }

The code works fine and copies the values all columns from the current row into a new one except that of the last column that constitutes the primary key. That way the user will have to make the appropriate changes to the new record, so it can be inserted correctly.

There are a few points worth mentioning in this apprach

  • if your view object contains attributes from multiple entity objects then the the key attributes of the referenced entities that gets inserted by the framework appear to be updatable -- hence the catch (ReadOnlyAttrException roe) line. I have brought this to the JDeveloper forum but got no suggestions.
  • Using the above technique requires that you expose the createLike() method to the ViewObject's client interface. See the previous post for details.
  • The most probable use of this method will be to place a command button into an <af:tableSelectOne> facet in order to drive your users to an edit page with values already set. On most occasions the edit page will contain a commit button that will perform the final post. My suggestion is to use a backing bean to invoke the commit action like I discuss in a previous article named ADF/JSF Avoiding uncaught exceptions after commit that will prevent the controller layer to change back to the browse page in case of any errors.

Thursday 15 May 2008

Oracle ADF: A view object with cancelInsert and cancelEdit operations

I have already discussed the problem of providing a cancel button in an ADF/JSF edit page. Here is an alternative that allows the usage of a base view object that provides both a cancel edit and a cancel insert method.

I have come to believe that this method is the most appealing so here is a brief outline of how to use it :

First create the following class in the queries package of you model application.

package myapp.model.queries;

import oracle.jbo.Row;
import oracle.jbo.server.ViewObjectImpl;

public class AB_BaseViewObject
    extends ViewObjectImpl {

    public AB_BaseViewObject()
    {
    }
    
    /**
     * Refresh the view obejct's current row from the dataset practically 
     * undoing any changes.
     */
    public void cancelEdits() 
    {
        Row r = getCurrentRow();

        if (r != null) 
            r.refresh( Row.REFRESH_WITH_DB_FORGET_CHANGES);
    }
    
    /**
     * Undo changes and get rid of new rows
     */
    public void cancelInsert()
    {
        clearCache();      
    }
}

Next create Java Classes that extend the AB_ViewObject for all the view objects that require editing in your project. Publish the cancelXXX() methods on the view interface like in following picture.

Finally create buttons on the edit or create pages in the ViewController project that call the methods.

Wednesday 14 May 2008

Amarok on CentOS

Today I found the time to compile amarok on my x86_64 CentOS 5.1 machine at work. It was a long time since I compiled any version of amarok, thanks to Packman and openSUSE, but it worked. The truth of the matter is that the sound produced by the xine engine is a bit over bassed, still I enjoy very much the amarok experience that I may very well start getting used to it.

Anyway, here are the steps I followed. After installing the amarok sources in /usr/src I run

[root@lxbakalidis amarok-1.4.9.1]#yum install gcc-c++.x86_64
libstdc++-devel.x86_64 kdelibs-devel.x86_64 alsa-lib-devel.x86_64
zlib-devel.x86_64 taglib-devel.x86_64 ruby-libs.x86_64 ruby.x86_64
xine-lib-devel.x86_64 libXv-devel.x86_64 libXvMC-devel.x86_64
ruby-devel.x86_64 sqlite-devel.x86_64

Then I did a

[root@lxbakalidis amarok-1.4.9.1]# ./configure --disable-debug

Finally I run make and make install and there I have it.

PS 1: Thanks for the tip bmcl

PS 2:When compiling on the new CentOS 5.2 you will additionally need package libutempter-devel. A simple ...

# yum install libutempter-devel

... is enough

.

Wednesday 23 April 2008

Java: Formatting a Number Using a Custom Format

The example comes form the The Java Developers Almanac 1.4 and I am adding it here to serve only as a quick reference note.

    // The 0 symbol shows a digit or 0 if no digit present
    NumberFormat formatter = new DecimalFormat("000000");
    String s = formatter.format(-1234.567);  // -001235
    // notice that the number was rounded up
    
    // The # symbol shows a digit or nothing if no digit present
    formatter = new DecimalFormat("##");
    s = formatter.format(-1234.567);         // -1235
    s = formatter.format(0);                 // 0
    formatter = new DecimalFormat("##00");
    s = formatter.format(0);                 // 00
    
    
    // The . symbol indicates the decimal point
    formatter = new DecimalFormat(".00");
    s = formatter.format(-.567);             // -.57
    formatter = new DecimalFormat("0.00");
    s = formatter.format(-.567);             // -0.57
    formatter = new DecimalFormat("#.#");
    s = formatter.format(-1234.567);         // -1234.6
    formatter = new DecimalFormat("#.######");
    s = formatter.format(-1234.567);         // -1234.567
    formatter = new DecimalFormat(".######");
    s = formatter.format(-1234.567);         // -1234.567
    formatter = new DecimalFormat("#.000000");
    s = formatter.format(-1234.567);         // -1234.567000
    
    
    // The , symbol is used to group numbers
    formatter = new DecimalFormat("#,###,###");
    s = formatter.format(-1234.567);         // -1,235
    s = formatter.format(-1234567.890);      // -1,234,568
    
    // The ; symbol is used to specify an alternate pattern for negative values
    formatter = new DecimalFormat("#;(#)");
    s = formatter.format(-1234.567);         // (1235)
    
    // The ' symbol is used to quote literal symbols
    formatter = new DecimalFormat("'#'#");
    s = formatter.format(-1234.567);         // -#1235
    formatter = new DecimalFormat("'abc'#");
    s = formatter.format(-1234.567);         // -abc1235

Thursday 20 March 2008

Oracle ADF Two action listeners in one action

Some time ago, I run into a situation when I wanted to add two action listeners inside a single command element but I realized that this was just not possible. When I asked about that in the JDeveloper forums somebody told me that this could only be accomplished in code, but at that time my knowledge was just not enough

A couple of days ago I run into the same problem. I had a view page that when accessed wanted to know two things:

  • First was the ${row.rowKeyStr} of the row to display and ...
  • Next a session scope boolean parameter called #{sessionScope.returnHome} that indicated whether to return the user to the application home page or to another (the search in that case) page.

To summarize, I ended up with the a button called View record in two different pages both having a navigation case (also called view) linking to the view record page. in the application JSF diagram.

On both cases the expression #{row.rowKeyStr} had to be recorded in the JSF session scope along with a value for the returnHome flag that had to be true on one occasion and false on the other..

Following is the code I used to perform this. First the base class :

package myapp.view.backing;

import javax.faces.application.Application;
import javax.faces.context.FacesContext;
import javax.faces.el.ValueBinding;

class backing_SRListBase {

    public backing_SRListBase()
    {
    }
    
    public String viewButtonBase_action( boolean returnHome)
    {
        // access the faces context
        FacesContext fc = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance();
        Application app = fc.getApplication();
        
        // on both case row.rowKeyStr points to the current row key
        ValueBinding vbActRowKey = app.createValueBinding("#{row.rowKeyStr}");
        String rowKey = (String )vbActRowKey.getValue(fc);
                
        // in that case we must save that in sessionScope
        ValueBinding vbSessionScopeRowKey = app.createValueBinding("#{sessionScope.rowKey}");
        vbSessionScopeRowKey.setValue( fc, rowKey);
                
        // also save the return home boolean value
        ValueBinding vbReturnHome = app.createValueBinding("#{sessionScope.returnHome}");
        vbReturnHome.setValue( fc, new Boolean( returnHome));
        
        return "view";
    }
}

Finally, the backing bean for each of the two pages looks like this

package myapp.view.backing;

public class backing_OpenSRList 
    extends backing_SRListBase {

    public backing_OpenSRList()
    {
    }

    public String viewButton_action()
    {
        return viewButtonBase_action( false);
    }
}

Friday 7 March 2008

Firefox 2.0.0.0.x on CentOS 5.1

Thanks to people like Diezel who posted the original article on nixadmins.net, we now know that in order for Firefox 2.0 to run on a CentOS (or Red Hat EL) version 5.1 machine, we need to install compat-libstdc++-33.

Using yum this is done as easy as entering

#yum install compat-libstdc++-33

s the root user. The rest is trivial.

Friday 29 February 2008

Deploying Oracle ADF: What did I learn about caching

Our company's production application server is located at a site different than the one we do our development. Whenever we deployed a new application users were always complaining about long response times, but we usually blamed that on the network. When we moved away from jsps and started working with JSF pages things really got out of hand.

Response times took as much as 10 seconds when application pages where accessed via WAN, rising the user complaint level to maximum levels.

Additionally the network link appeared to be utilized below 80% and then application server response times as shown at OC4J administration website where much below 0.045 sec.

First thing we tried was to use Oracle's ADF Cache library as explained in Chapter 23 of the ADF Programmers guide for Forms/4GL Developers, without any success. To be precise the library was indeed incorporated into the application but the server response time was still as long as 9 or 10 seconds.

It was then when we asked for help from Oracle Support. So thanks to Kavintha we learned the following :

  • First thing we learned was that the problem was indeed related to caching. Every JSF page created using Oracle ADF utilizes a Javascript file named Common10_1_3_3_0.js with a file size of 120 KB. This is an external script referenced at every page. The problem was that this script was never cached so users had to download it every time causing the delays mentioned above. If this file -- and all related page images -- are cached, then the usual size of an ADF/JSF generated HTML code ranges between 1 and 2 KBytes.
    Enabling full caching options on the Oracle Apache Server can be done by uncommenting the # CacheNegotiatedDocs line of the httpd.conf file located in $ORACLE_HOME/Apache/Apache/conf.
  • Next thing was that if an application is protected by Single-Sign-On then in that case, no matter whether CacheNegotiatedDocs is commented out or not, Apache will always send no-cache headers practically undoing whatever the Apache configuration or the ADF Faces Cache library do.
    The way to allow caching for SSO protected applications is to modify mod_osso.conf located in $ORACLE_HOME/Apache/Apache/conf so the entry for each application looks like this :
            <Location /ProductionDelays>
                    OssoSendCacheHeaders off 
                    require valid-user
                    AuthType Basic
            </Location>
    
    More information about how to to disable the caching headers sent by SSO is available on Metalink note 226119.1. Also you may have a look at a one of my previous postings regarding using SSO which is available through here
  • Last thing we learned about this caching business was that when a JSF application is accessed via SSL, then again caching issues still apply. Firefox will disable caching by default whenever the user loads an https:// URL. IE on the other hand does cache SSL pages by default but this setting can change by a policy set by your system administrator. I realize that in this case Firefox uses the safest approach but unfortunately this will produce very poor results if ADF/JSF pages are to be accessed.
    Enabling disk caching of SSL pages in Firefox can be done by changing the value of the browser.cache.disk_cache_ssl parameter available from the about:config URL.
    IE on the other hand has an option called Do not save encrypted pages to disk available in the Security section of the Advanced internet properties tab. If you want IE to cache content from SSL pages this option must be unchecked.

Wednesday 27 February 2008

Changing the JDeveloper IDE font size

If you are like me and wish that the JDeveloper IDE displayed using a bigger font, then thanks to Khaled from Oracle support all you need to do is shut down JDeveloper, and then add a line like the following in the file ide.properties located in \jdev\system\oracle.jdeveloper.10.1.3.X.Y.

Ide.FontSize=14

Finally start JDeveloper and you are done.

Notes

  1. The actual X, Y values in the oracle.jdeveloper.10.1.3.X.Y may vary depending on your version of JDeveloper. In 10.1.3.3 X=41 and Y=57, while in 10.1.3.4 X=42 and Y = 70. Anyway the safest approach is to have a look at the Oracle IDE version in the versions tab of the JDev about box as show in the image below.
  2. Needless to say that the same goes for SQLDeveloper. The only difference is that he file to edit is located in ~/.sqldeveloper/system/oracle.sqldeveloper.1.2.1.3213. If using SQLDeveoper version 1.5 that comes with the new JDev11g look and feel then again the file chek is .sqldeveloper/system1.5.1.54.40/o.sqldeveloper.11.1.1.54.40/ide.properties.
  3. On Jdeveloper 11g the ide.properties file location is ~/.jdeveloper/system11.1.1.0.31.51.56/o.jdeveloper. Once more the actul path may be determined by looking at the Oracle IDE version from the about box.

Saturday 23 February 2008

Oracle 11g How to determine the database character set

This is only a quick note for something I keep forgetting. So to determine the oracle database character set use the following simple SQL statement.

   select *
      from v$nls_parameters
      where parameter='NLS_CHARACTERSET'

Monday 11 February 2008

Oracle 10g Killing open sesions

We have a client program that leaves lots of open sessions. These sessions take up server resources and we wanted to find a way to locate and kill them.

Thanks to Natasa Oikonomidou from Softworks who provided the code, I ended up with the following solution:

Create a the following procedure on the sys schema.

create or replace
PROCEDURE inactive_session_killer
IS
  now DATE;
BEGIN
  now := sysdate;
  FOR rec IN
    (SELECT sid,
       serial#,
       username,
       schemaname,
       osuser,
       terminal,
       machine,
       PROGRAM,
       status,
       type,
       saddr,
       logon_time,
       now - last_call_et / 86400 last_activity
     FROM v$session
     WHERE username = 'XXXXX'   -- user name of open session "leaver"
           AND type = 'USER')
  LOOP

    IF rec.last_activity <( now  - 8 / 24) THEN
      -- inactive for more than 8 hours
      -- you can keep a log table here: inserrt into ...
      EXECUTE IMMEDIATE 'alter system kill session ''' ||  
                                        rec.sid || ',' || 
                                        rec.serial#    || 
                                        ''' immediate';

    END IF;

  END LOOP;
END;

Using SQLPlus or SQL Developer execute the following

 
VARIABLE jobno number;
BEGIN
   DBMS_JOB.SUBMIT(:jobno, 'inactive_session_killer;', SYSDATE, 'SYSDATE + 1/24');    -- runs every hour
   commit;
END;

... and that does it.

Wednesday 23 January 2008

Oracle IAS 10g 10.1.3.1 Installation on Enterprise Linux 5

Yesterday I completed my first installation of Oracle SOA Suite 10.1.3.1 on Oracle Enterprise Linux 5. In order to complete the installation I followed Metalink Note:465159.1, which explains the exact procedure.

Now the only tip I can give you, is to make sure that the /etc/hosts file contains a line that resolves the locally or DNS assigned computer name and domain to the machines network IP address.

My up until now experience has been with SuSE systems only, so on my machine the /etc/hosts/ file always contains a line like

10.5.1.8 lxbakalidis.shelman.int lxbakalidis

An OEL installation hosts file only contains

# Do not remove the following line, or various programs
# that require network functionality will fail.
127.0.0.1       localhost.localdomain   localhost       lxBakalidis
::1     localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6

... but this is not enough. The installation completed successfully only after I added the line that resolved the external IP to my computer name. So the final etc/hosts file looked something like this :

# Do not remove the following line, or various programs
# that require network functionality will fail.
127.0.0.1       localhost.localdomain   localhost       lxBakalidis
::1     localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6
10.5.1.8 lxbakalidis.shelman.int lxbakalidis

The symptoms before that were: First OUI was taking a very long time to do the file copy operation and next when at some point installation would complete, then two out of three configuration assistants would fail.

Friday 11 January 2008

ABAP Get the value of a date type characteristic

When an object is classified with characteristics of type date then, using BAPI BAPI_OBJCL_GETCLASSES these characteristics are returned as numeric. That means that entries for date characteristics are found in the valuesnum array which --as you remeber from a couple of postings back -- is defined to be a standard table of bapi1003_alloc_values_num.

When I first saw this I thought that the actual date value could be acquired by assigning the value_from part of the returned bapi1003_alloc_values_num structure to a date variable, but it was not at all like this. The actual value is stored like an integer representing the ABAP internal date fromat which is YYYYMMDD. So an integer value like 20080112 represents January 12th 2008.

In ABAP code this translates as follows

  DATA :
    temp_int TYPE i,
    temp_date_str(8) TYPE c, 
    my_date TYPE d.

  FIELD-SYMBOLS :
     TYPE bapi1003_alloc_values_num.

      READ TABLE valuesnum
        WITH KEY charact = 'MY_DATE_CHARACT'
        ASSIGNING .

      IF sy-subrc = 0.
        temp_int = -value_from.
        temp_date_str = temp_int.
        my_date = temp_date_str.
      ENDIF.

Java: Dates/Times and Calendars

The problem that many new Java programmers -- me included -- face when they start dealing with dates and times is : Given a java.util.Date object get month, date and year fields in separate variables.

The usual misunderstanding here is that the class java.util.Date is almost deprecated and all things you expect to be able to perform with dates are done using the java.util.Calendar; class.

Calendar is an abstract class whose javadoc can be found here. The class provides get and set methods that allow you to alter any of the fields that constitute a point in time. The following example demonstrates one way to calculate the date corresponding to the start of the current term, using the Calendar get and set functions. It also shows how to convert a Date to a Calendar and vice versa.

    private void calStartOfCurrentTerm()
    {
        // create a new Gregorian Calendar
        Calendar c = new GregorianCalendar();
        // you can synchronize a Calendar with a date by using the
        // setTime() method
        c.setTime( new Date());
        
        // once you get a Calendar extracting field information is 
        // as easy as ....
        int month = c.get( Calendar.MONTH);
        int day = c.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH);
        int year = c.get(Calendar.YEAR);
        
        // let's calculate the date that corresponds to the 
        // start of the current term
        int newMonth;
        
        switch (month) {
        case Calendar.JANUARY:
        case Calendar.FEBRUARY:
        case Calendar.MARCH:
            newMonth = Calendar.JANUARY;
            break;
        case Calendar.APRIL:
        case Calendar.MAY:
        case Calendar.JUNE:
            newMonth = Calendar.JANUARY;
            break;
        case Calendar.JULY:
        case Calendar.AUGUST:
        case Calendar.SEPTEMBER:
            newMonth = Calendar.JULY;
            break;
        default:
            newMonth = Calendar.OCTOBER;
        }
        
        // adjust the calendar to point to the new date
        c.set(Calendar.MONTH, newMonth);
        c.set(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH, 1);
        
        // get the information to a new date variable
        Date startOfTerm = c.getTime();
        
        // display results
        System.out.println("Day is " + day +" month is " + month + " year is " + year);
        System.out.println( startOfTerm.toString());
    }

Here is a slightly different version that returns an object of type oracle.jbo.domain.Date

import java.sql.Timestamp;

import java.util.Calendar;
import java.util.GregorianCalendar;

import oracle.jbo.domain.Date;

  private Date getStartOfTerm()
  {
    // create a new Gregorian Calendar
    Calendar c = new GregorianCalendar();

    // once you get a Calendar extracting field information is 
    // as easy as ....
    int month = c.get(Calendar.MONTH);

    // let's calculate the date that corresponds to the 
    // start of the current term
    int newMonth;

    switch (month) {
      case Calendar.JANUARY:
      case Calendar.FEBRUARY:
      case Calendar.MARCH:
        newMonth = Calendar.JANUARY;
        break;
      case Calendar.APRIL:
      case Calendar.MAY:
      case Calendar.JUNE:
        newMonth = Calendar.JANUARY;
        break;
      case Calendar.JULY:
      case Calendar.AUGUST:
      case Calendar.SEPTEMBER:
        newMonth = Calendar.JULY;
        break;
      default:
        newMonth = Calendar.OCTOBER;
    }

    // adjust the calendar to point to the new date
    c.set(Calendar.MONTH, newMonth);
    c.set(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH, 1);
    c.set(Calendar.HOUR_OF_DAY, 0);
    c.set(Calendar.MINUTE, 0);
    c.set(Calendar.SECOND, 0);
    c.set(Calendar.MILLISECOND, 0);
    
    // get the information to a new date variable
    java.util.Date javaDate = c.getTime();
    Timestamp st = new Timestamp(javaDate.getTime());
    return new Date(st);
  }

PS:. Finally There is one last thing I have to get used to. "Copy as HTML" on JDeveloper 10g, does not work on openSUSE 10.2.

Thursday 10 January 2008

ABAP Obtaining characteristics of a document from the classification system

In addition to a previous post regarding getting classification information for objects of type Material or Batch and thanks to additional info and feedback that I received from our MM specialist Ms Marilena Svolaki, I will be able to provide an example of how to do the same thing with documents.

Master information about documents is found in the DRAW table. (This is short for German Dokumentinformationssatz). The key fields for each document are displayed in the following image :

Creating the object key for BAPI_OBJCL_GETCLASSES is performed by concatenating the document type (field DRAW-DOKAR), the document number (field DRAW-DOKNR), the document version (field DRAW-DOKVR) and the document part (field DRAW-DOKTL). In code this can be expressed as follows

 DATA
    wa_draw TYPE draw, 
    cur_bapi_objectkey LIKE inob-objek,

    class_list TYPE STANDARD TABLE OF bapi1003_alloc_list,
    valueschar TYPE STANDARD TABLE OF bapi1003_alloc_values_char,
    valuescurr TYPE STANDARD TABLE OF bapi1003_alloc_values_curr,
    valuesnum  TYPE STANDARD TABLE OF bapi1003_alloc_values_num,
    return     TYPE STANDARD TABLE OF bapiret2.

*   Make wa_draw somehow correspond to a valid document entry ....     
    CONCATENATE wa_draw-dokar
                wa_draw-doknr
                wa_draw-dokvr
                wa_draw-doktl
                INTO cur_bapi_objectkey.

*   Call BAPI to get the list of characteristics
    CALL FUNCTION 'BAPI_OBJCL_GETCLASSES'
    EXPORTING
      objectkey_imp         = cur_bapi_objectkey
      objecttable_imp       = 'DRAW'
      classtype_imp         = '017'
      read_valuations       = 'X'
      keydate               = sy-datum
*     language              = 'E'
    TABLES
      alloclist             = class_list
      allocvalueschar       = valueschar
      allocvaluescurr       = valuescurr
      allocvaluesnum        = valuesnum
      return                = return.

    READ TABLE return INDEX 1 ASSIGNING <ret>.

*   Check that object allocations exist
    IF  sy-subrc = 0 AND
        <ret>-id = 'CL' AND
        <ret>-number = 741.

*      Read characteristic values
       ...
    ENDIF