Demonstrating some new JHeadstart 10.1.3.1 Features

A few days ago, the Oracle JHeadstart team released the 10.1.3.1 release. It was announced as ‘a point release’  but it turns out to offer a substantial chunk of new functionality. In this article, I will demonstrate some of these new features, including:

• table column summary
• generate buttons to create and duplicate row
• generation of graphs

The first feature we will look at is

Summary Types in Table

A new item-level checkbox property
"Display Summary Type in Table" has been added. You can set the value to "sum", "average" or "count".

When set, an additional total row is
displayed at the bottom of the table, showing the computed summary type
of the item for all rows in the data collection.

Now for the really cool part of this feature: it is AJAX enabled! If you change one of the values in the Aggregated Column and tab out of the field, the Column Aggregate is refreshed – through Partial Page Refresh – without the user having to submit the page.

Generating Add Row and Duplicate Row buttons

With two two simple checkboxes at Group Level we can specify that a Table should have an Add Row and/or Duplicate Row button. Here we define our Emp Group to have these two buttons in the Table Layout.

When we generate the application and run the EmpTable page, the buttons are there alright:

Pressing the Duplicate Row button will create a copy of the currently selected row. Note that the row is not yet posted to the database, it only exists in the model.

Adding a row is exactly that: create a new, empty row in the table. This is very useful in combination with a Table Overflow, as we cannot combine Table Overflow and one or more New Rows:

Generating Graphs

Another cool new feature – theoretically – is generation of graphs. JHeadstart does not actually generate the graph itself: it generates the graph component in the page and the associated graph binding element in the Page Definition file (see for details also: Undocumented Sample 88 by Steve Muench, http://radio.weblogs.com/0118231/stories/2004/09/23/notYetDocumentedAdfSampleApplications.html , and the OTN disucssion thread http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=358978 ).

My first attempts with this feature were not very successful: generation seems okay, the BI Graph meta-file is created but no graph appears in the browser. To see whether the problem is not my environment, I try out Steve Muench’s sample, but that one is running quite good:

Unfortunately, additional experimentation did not make me very more successful nor happy. I will wait for the JHeadstart 10.1.3.1 Developer’s Guide to tell what I did wrong.