Re: Migrating ADF Faces app to use Facelets

[Adam Winer]

Frank Felix Debatin wrote:

Hi,

finally I managed to migrate our ADF Faces app to use facelets. Ton of work,
but it went smoothly and really pays off, making the page writing much more

clean and powerful.

What a wonderful combination!!!

Glad you liked it!

Here is a small migration guide for those who intend to do the same (note:
I'm a Facelets beginner so there might be alternatives or better solutions):

1. Get the ADF Facelets contribution on the Facelets website and precisely
follow the instructions provided there. I ended with the following entries
in web.xml:

  <context-param>
 <param-name>oracle.adf.view.faces.ALTERNATE_VIEW_HANDLER
</param-name>
 <param-value>com.sun.facelets.FaceletViewHandler
</param-value>
  </context-param>
        
  <context-param>
    <param-name>facelets.DEVELOPMENT</param-name>
    <param-value>true</param-value>
  </context-param>

  <context-param>
    <param-name>facelets.VIEW_MAPPINGS</param-name>
    <param-value>*.xhtml</param-value>
  </context-param>

  ...

  <servlet-mapping>
        <servlet-name>faces</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>/faces/*</url-pattern>

</servlet-mapping>

2. Include the XML name spaces in your pages as follows (and don't forget to
change the extension .xhtml if you have the recommended web.xml
configuration)

<af:document
   xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html";
   xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core";
    xmlns:ui="http://java.sun.com/jsf/facelets";
    xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core";
    xmlns:af="http://xmlns.oracle.com/adf/faces";
    title="Hello World">
   <af:form>
     Hello World!
  </af:form>
</af:document>

3. Directly replace <af:forEach> tags with <c:forEach>. The <af:forEach>
tags are not provided in the contributed tag library, but the <c:forEach>

worked fine wherever I substituted them.

4. Replace <af:region> with <ui:include>, providing a src attribute pointing
to the page instead of the old region attributes. (Consider <ui:decorate> as
an alternative if you like.) This requires some manual rewriting. The region
<af:attribute>s need to be replaces by include <ui:param>s. Get rid of the
"var." in the former region definition files. Consider surrounding the

region definition files with <ui:composition>.

Yep, ui:include is a much cleaner way of handling this;
af:region was partly a workaround for the failure of jsp:include
to really work well with

5. (Optionally - cleaner). Get rid of <f:verbatim> by writing straight
inline HTML.

6. (Optionally - cleaner). Replace <af:outputFormatted> with <af:outputText>
and HTML markup for user supplied values, so user-supplied markup is
filtered out.

Did you mean this the opposite way?  My suggestion is to replace
af:outputText escape="false" with af:outputFormatted where
user-supplied markup is present, so it gets filtered down to a
legit set without worrying about cross-site scripting.

7. Take care not to include any non-ADF stuff such as inline text or markup
in ADF tables, including the "details". This will cause an ugly stack trace
that completely messes up the involved session. I didn't encounter this
problem with any other of the ADF tags.

Could you e-mail me that stack trace?  This is supposed to work.

8. Entities: It seems that inline HTML entities need to escaped such as:
  (for the non-breakable backspace).

You could just use  

-- Adam