OAF - Tables and PPR

It has just taken me two days to implement PPR on a table, yes 2. I might be a little slow but the developers guide was of very little help and I was unable to find any worthwhile examples.

When planning to implement PPR in tables it is very important to decide early on what type of PPR you want to implement. Let’s take a step back, when implementing PPR on normal fields outside a table, there is only one instance of each field to modify. But when working in a table there might exist an infinite amount of rows each with an instance of the specific field.

If functionality requires that all instances of the PPR field behaves in the same fashion, PPR using SPEL bindings will work perfectly, and is very quick and easy to implement. On the other hand if you require each instance of the PPR field to act independently based on another value in its table row, you will have to look at Bound Values or Content Switcher.

In this post I will focus on Bound Values as this is the solution I implemented, the Dev guide specifies the following consideration when having to decide which solution to use:

“You should limit your use of Switchers to within tables, particularly when you want to switch between different kinds of web beans, such as a poplist or a checkbox. When you have only one type of web bean, but the value of an attribute on that web bean varies at runtime, then you should implement that attribute as a bound value rather than as a Switcher.”

PPR using Bound Values:

• Add a transient attribute to your table view object; you will bind this attribute to the value of the PPR column’s RENDERED attribute.
  

• Modify the transient attribute getter method to change the value depending on your PPR requirement. In my case I needed to render the Supplier Name field based on the value of the SupplierYn attribute in the table view object:

public Boolean getSupplierNameRendered()
{
String yn = getSupplierYn();
Boolean tf = Boolean.TRUE;

if ("Y".equals(yn))
{
tf = Boolean.TRUE;
}
else if ("N".equals(yn))
{
tf = Boolean.FALSE;
}

return (Boolean) tf;
}

• Now bind the Supplier Name attribute to the transient attribute in the page controller’s processRequest method:
  

OAMessageLovInputBean supplierNameBean = (OAMessageLovInputBean) webBean.findIndexedChildRecursive(
"SupplierName");

supplierNameBean.setAttributeValue(
RENDERED_ATTR,
new OADataBoundValueViewObject(supplierNameBean,
"SupplierNameRendered", "SupplierVO1",
false));

• The rendering of my attribute was based on the value of the attribute “SupplierYn” in the view object; to enable the updating change “Action Type” attribute to “fireAction”:

There it is four easy steps to enable PPR on a table.