ADF 11g Rich Client Components – programmatically adding a ShowPopupBehavior

This morning I received an email from a reader of one of my articles on the blog. The challenge in the email: I want to programmatically create an input field. Then I want to add a showpopup behavior to this input field – to have a popup display when the field is hovered over with the mouse. It turns out that the ShowPopupBehavior is not a UIComponent that you can simply add a child to another UIComponent. So could it be done and if so, how?

A little investigation made clear

that RichInputText, the component class for the Rich InputText component, has a method getClientListeners() (as well as setClientListeners()). When you specify a showPopupBehavior tag in the JSPX file, it is turned into a client side behavior object that is registered in this set of ClientListeners. To programmatically create showpopupbehavior, we have to manipulate this set. Note: all RichInput components seem to have the get/setClientListeners methods; they are not inherited from a common superclass.

The code required in the use case for my emailing reader now turns out to be quite simple.

With this JSF page:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='windows-1252'?>
<jsp:root xmlns:jsp="http://java.sun.com/JSP/Page" version="2.1"
          xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core"
          xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"
          xmlns:af="http://xmlns.oracle.com/adf/faces/rich">
  <jsp:directive.page contentType="text/html;charset=windows-1252"/>
  <f:view>
    <af:document>
      <af:form binding="#{PageManager.form}">
        <af:popup id="myPopup">
          <af:panelWindow title="The Popup"/>
        </af:popup>
      </af:form>
    </af:document>
  </f:view>
</jsp:root>

The backing bean has this code:

package nl.amis.view;

import java.util.Set;

import oracle.adf.view.rich.component.rich.RichForm;
import oracle.adf.view.rich.component.rich.input.RichInputText;
import oracle.adf.view.rich.event.ClientListenerSet;

public class PageManager {
    private RichForm form;

    public PageManager() {
    }

    public void setForm(RichForm form) {
        RichInputText newText = new RichInputText();
        newText.setLabel("new Text");
        newText.setId("newText1");

        ClientListenerSet set = newText.getClientListeners();
        if (set == null) {
            set = new ClientListenerSet();
            newText.setClientListeners(set);
        }
        set.addBehavior("new AdfShowPopupBehavior('myPopup',AdfRichPopup.ALIGN_AFTER_END,null,'mouseOver')");
        form.getChildren().add(newText);
        this.form = form;
    }

    public RichForm getForm() {
        return form;
    }

}

It creates the rich inputText along with the behavior to display a Popup when hovered over: