Oracle Forms Javabean Property Editor

Posted on January 16th, 2009.

As I was finalizing the technical note for another gauge bean, it hit me that I wasted quite some time designing the visual part of the bean. In Oracle Forms, you create the bean on the canvas, assign it a height and width and then set up the implementation class.

Now, in order to customize it, you would have to follow the bean’s developer recommendations and use the set_custom_property built-in in order to modify the bean properties. However, this implies that as a developer, you would have to compile and run the module each time in order to see the result.

In my case, it requires a number of iterations and that bothers me quite a bit. That’s where I suddenly realized that when I designed MouliForms, I created a class that was basically a clone of the Oracle Forms property palette editor ( Remember F4 !!).

I asked myself whether I can extend the same concept to Forms javabeans and here what I think should come out in a few days (hopefully not weeks):

  • Create an XML file that lists the bean’s properties, categories they belong to and type (String, Int or boolean).
  • From the property palette editor, read and parse the XML file.
  • Developer will select the values for each property and then Preview the bean
  • If the developer is fine with the design, output the bean init procedure as an Oracle Forms program unit.
  • I guess that should do it and could be very useful.

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    2 Responses to “Oracle Forms Javabean Property Editor”

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    There also exists a white paper on OTN about “How Do I Debug Oracle9i Forms Developer Pluggable Java Components”:
    http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/forms/htdocs/howto_debug_pjc.html
    that would be a good complement to your entry ;D
    Francois

    Francois Degrelle
    January 21st, 2009

    Hi Francois,

    Yes that’s a good one. In my case, I was thinking about providing a developer about a nice way to set the bean properties using a property editor similar to Forms property palette, especially setting up font properties and color properties from font and color swatch selectors.

    Hafed
    January 21st, 2009

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    Enterprise IT Tools and Thoughts, dealing mainly with Oracle Developer tools (Forms & Reports)

    By Hafed Benteftifa

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