ADF 11.1.1.7 : The return of the paging table (… and more ….)

It looks like oracle made JDeveloper and ADF 11.1.1.7 available today. Perhaps not officially, but it can be downloaded. There are several interesting new components available. One of these is the codeEditor component which allows you to write code and have syntax highlighting. Not sure if I see a use case for this, but I’m in for a surprise. Also new are several DVT components such as the timeline, the sunburst and the treemap. And yes, hurray hurray, we now have the panelgridlayout available in 11gR1 ! Apparently there is also multi file upload. These are all very nice, but I’m also very enthusiastic about the return of the paging table.

This was the standard in 10g, but disappeared in 11g. It took 7 releases to get it back. In this post I describe how to use it.

How it works.
It is actually pretty straightforward.
The table can be created as usual. So simply create default business components for the employees table, drag and drop the employees collection from your data control on a new page.
In order to make the table a paging table you need to use following attribute settings:

• scrollPolicy=’page’ (yes, this is a new attribute for the table component)
• autoHeightRows=’0′

Also, the table must be inside a flowing container such as a panelGroupLayout with layout =”scroll”.
First surround the table with a panelcollection, and then surround the panelcollection with the “scrolling” panelGroupLayout.

Too bad that you cannot see the effect in the Desing view in JDeveloper.
The page structure should now look like this:

Running the page will show you the paging table.
It has the paging bar at the bottom. The bar enables you to scroll between pages by either typing a page number in the box, using the arrow controls, or click on a pagenumber.

Other new table features
I noticed another feature that looked very interesting. It is called BlockRowNavigationOnError, and it does exactly what it says. This is when you select a row and do some editing inside the table or in a related form, and this editing causes some validation failures. At this time, if you click on a different row in table, we want to block you from moving to the new row.
I’m very happy with this new feature because it now finally enables editing in a table without having to worry about multiple rows having errors. We can now block navigation !

Resources
The complete component demo can be found here.