Using ADF BC Declarative Built-in Rules (Part 3 of 10): Compare Validator

The my last two posts I’ve demoed how to use the “CollectionValidator” and the “Unique Key Validator”, two declarative validation options that can be defined at the entity level.

In the following six posts I will be going through the declarative validation rules that can be defined either at the entity or attribute level but pertain to an entity object attribute and these are the “Compare Validator”, the “Key Exists Validator”, the “Length Validator”, the “List Validator”, the “Range Validator” and the “Regular Expression Validator”.

So the “Compare Validator” is a validator that can be defined either at the entity or the attribute level but relates to an entity object attribute and it used to perform a logical comparison between an entity attribute and another value. This other value could be a literal value, the result of a query, a view object attribute, a view accessor attribute, an expression or an entity attribute. I will demo all these options.

So let’s start by creating an application, in my case it is called "CompareValidatorDemo" and create the basic ADF BC objects for this tutorial. For creating the ADF BC objects (entities and views) i have used the "Business Components from Tables" wizard and created entities for the Employees, Departments, Regions and Countries table, their corresponding view objects and an application module as depicted in the screenshot below.

Let's define the first "Compare Validator" rule on the Employees entity to ensure that an employee's salary does not exceed a defined amount. On the Employees entity, under the "Business Rules" tab click the green plus button "Create new validator".

From the "Add Validation Rule" window select "Compare" in the "Type" drop down and from the "Rule Definition" tab select "Salary" in the "Attribute" drop down, "LessOrEqualTo" as the "Operator" and in the "Compare With" combo select "Literal Value". Enter a value in the "Enter Literal Value" field.

In the "Failure Handling" tab define a failure message and click "OK". In my example I have used two message token expressions to construct a dynamic error message, passing to the failure message the employee's first name and last name.

To test your newly defined "Compare Validator" run the Application module and and try to update one of the employee's salary to a value greater than 40,000. For example, try to update Steven King's salary to 40,001. You should get your custom dynamic error message displayed.

 

Let's see now how you can compare an Entity attribute against the results of a query. I will define a new "Compare Validator" but this time i will enforce a business rule to make sure a user can't specify a future date as the employee's hire date.

So on the Employees entity, under the "Business Rules" tab click the green plus button "Create new validator" and create a new "Compare Validator" business rule. From the "Add Validation Rule" window select "Compare" in the "Type" drop down and from the "Rule Definition" tab select "HireDate" in the "Attribute" drop down, "LessOrEqualTo" as the "Operator" and in the "Compare With" combo select "Query Result" and enter "select sysdate from dual" as an SQL statement.

In the "Failure Handling" tab define a failure message and test the new business rule you've defined by running the Application module and updating one of the employee's hire date to a past date.You should get your error message displayed.

You can implement the exact same business rule using a Groovy expression. So instead of using the "Query Result" option in the "Compare With" combo, select "Expression" and enter "adf.currentDate" as a Groovy expression to get the current date.

 

Run the Application module and update one of the employee's hire date to a past date.You should get your error message displayed.

You can also compare an Entity's attribute against a view object's attribute using the "View Object Attribute" option in the "Compare With" drop down. This should be used with great caution as it will use the first row's attribute for comparison.

Just for demo purposes i will be comparing the entity's first name against the Employee's view object last name to ensure they are not the same.

Define an error message in the "Failure Handling" tab and run the application module to test this business rule. The first record that you get when accessing the Employees view  is Steven King and the second employee is Neena Kochhar. Go to another employee, for example to employee with id 102 (Lex De Haan). Update Lex's last name to Kochhar and click the "Validate Row" button. The employee's last name is valid. Now update Lex's last name to King and validate the record. You should get your error message displayed.

 

So a "View Object Attribute" will compare an entity's attribute against the first row's attribute. If you want to compare an entity's attribute against the entire set of view object attribute values you would use the "View Accessor Attribute" option which requires a "View Accessor" to be created. 

For this demo i will be using the "Countries" entity to ensure a country's name is not the same as the region it belongs to. To do so i will have to first create a view criteria on the "Regions" view object as follows.

Then, on the "Countries" entity, under the "View Accessors" tab, create a new accessor by shuffling the "RegionsVO" view object from the "Available View Objects" list to the "View Accessors" list.

Having the "RegionsVO" selected click on the "Edit" button and shuffled the view criteria you've created on the "Regions" view from the available list to the selected list.If you've followed my exact steps you should have a parameter (regionId) that you should bind to the entity's RegionId parameter.

Create a new "Compare" validator and use the newly created accessor to compare the entity's country name to it's corresponding region name.

Define an error message and run the application module to test your business rule. The first country once you access the Countries view is Argentina and has "Americas" defined as it's region name. Update Argentina's country name to Europe and validate the record. Validation is successful. Update Argentina's country name to Americas and validate the record. Validation should fail and you should get your custom error message.

 

The last feature that i would like to demo on the "Compare Validator" is the ability to compare an entity's attribute against another attribute from the same entity. For example, ensure that an employee can't have themselves defined as their manager. 

For this example i will be using the "Entity Attribute" option from the "Compare With" drop down to define this business rule.

Define an error message and run the application module to test your business rule. Update Steven King's manager to Neena Kochhar (with employee id = 101) and validate the employee record. Validation is successful. Define Steven King as Steven King's manager and validate the record. The validation will fail and you will get your custom error message displayed.

 

Download sample application: Compare Validator

SOA in the Banking Industry

I'm happy to announce that I have been invited to present at the "Oracle Cyprus Architect Club" event that will take place on Wednesday 7th May.

The theme is "Business Integration" and my presentation title is "SOA in the Banking Industry" where I will be sharing my experiences and knowledge I have gathered during a SOA implementation in one of the top 20 Financial Regulation and Supervision Institutions.

For registration please contact Ms. Maria Andreou by phone (+357 22 694694) or by email to cyprus-admin_cy@oracle.com

Hope to see you there!

eProseed Customer Success Story at Oracle WebCenter EMEA Partner Community Forum

Oracle is organizing its annual Oracle EMEA WebCenter Partner Community Forum on Monday, 28th April – Tuesday 29th April 2014 in Barcelona where I along with Manas Deb will be presenting a unique eProseed customer success story, a Webcenter & BPM dominated platform using the entire stack of Fusion Middleware (WebCenter Portal, WebCenter Content, BPM, SOA, BI EE, Data Warehouse, Oracle Data Integrator and Identity Management Suite).

Sorry but can't say anything more. The only thing that i will say is make sure you don't miss it!

See you all in Barcelona!

Hasta pronto!

Using ADF BC Declarative Built-in Rules (Part 2 of 10): Unique Key Validator

Following my previous post Using ADF BC Declarative Built-in Rules: Collection Validator I would like to cover another declarative build-in rule, the "Unique Key Validator".

The "Unique Key Validator" is an entity level validator that ensures that primary key values for an entity object are always unique. For example, in the Employees table in the HR schema you can create a "Unique Key Validator" on the "EMPLOYEE_ID" (since this is the primary key) to ensure that an employee should have a unique employee id. If a key (in this example an employee id) is found in either the entity's cache or the database a "TooManyObjectsException" is thrown. Let's see how you can define a "Unique Key Validator" on the EMPLOYEE_ID column of the EMPLOYEES HR table.

I've created a new ADF Application "UniqueKeyValidatorDemo" using the "Fusion Web Application (ADF)" template and using the "Business Components from Tables" wizard I've created an Entity "EmployeesEO" based on the EMPLOYEES table, a view "EmployeesVO" based on the "EmployeesEO" entity and an Application Module "UniqueKeyValidatorAM".

Business rules are defined on the entity object so to create a 'Unique Key Validator" open the "EmployeesEO" and in the "Business Rules" tab click the green plus icon "Create new validator".

From the "Add Validation Rule" window select "UniqueKey" in the "Type" drop down and select the "EmpEmpIdPk(Employee_ID)" key.

In the "Failure Handling" tab define a failure message and click "OK". In my example I have used three message token expressions to construct a dynamic error message, passing to the failure message the "Employee Id" (using the newValue expression to get the value being validated), "First Name" and "Last Name".

To test your newly defined "Unique Key Validator" run the Application module and and try to update one of the employees using an existing employee id. For example, try to update Steven King's employee id to 101. You should get your custom dynamic error message displayed.

What if you wanted to enforce a "Unique Key Validator" on a non-primary key attribute? For example, what if you wanted to ensure that every employee should have a unique email address. The The "Unique Key Validator" can be applied on non-primary key attributes known as "alternate keys".

You can create an alternate key using the entity's "General" tab. So in our case, let's create an alternate key for the "Email" attribute of the "EmployeesEO" entity object.  Under the "Alternate Keys" section click on the green plus icon "Add Alternate Key".

 In the "Define Alternate Key" window specify a name in the "Alternate key Name" field (in my case it's "EmailAltKey") and shuffle the "Email" attribute from the "Available" list to the "Selected" list and click "OK".

To define a "Unique Key Validator" based on the newly created email alternate key go to the "Business Rules" tab and click on the green plus button "Create new validator" (just as you did above with the "Unique Key Validator" defined on the Employee Id primary key). In the "Add Validation Rule" window select "UniqueKey" in the "Rule" drop down and select alternate key that you have created above.

Define a failure message using the "Failure Handling" tab and click "OK".

 

Run your application module and update an employee's email  with an existing email. For example, update Steven King's email to "NKOCHHAR". You should get an error message saying that the email is already in use.

Download sample application: Unique Key Validator

How a better Customer Experience can improve your business

Today, customers are surrounded by opportunities. It is therefore critical to make their experiences as enjoyable, simple, consistent, and relevant as possible as they move throughout the sales lifecycle, from buying to owning, and back again. By delivering exceptional customer experiences, businesses can acquire new customers, retain more customers, and improve efficiency.

Building the ultimate Customer Experience with eProseed and Oracle
Oracle, backed by eProseed's mastery of process and system integration - eProseed was elected Oracle Partner of the Year for four consecutive years -, provides the most complete, cloud-enabled customer experience solution in the industry, creating an environment where companies can differentiate themselves across all channels, touch points, and interactions.

eProseed and Oracle have the pleasure to invite you to the Workshop on How a better Customer Experience can improve your business, at Windsor restaurant, on 13^th May 2014 from 10:00 to 14:00.

AGENDA
10h00 – 10h30       Welcome & coffee
10h30 – 11h00       Introduction: eProseed
11h00 – 11h10       Oracle’s Customer Experience Concept
11h10 – 11h40       Social
11h40 – 12h10       Marketing
12h10 – 12h40       Customer Service
12h40 – 13h00       Q&A
13h00 – 14h00       Lunch

SPEAKERS
Bernard Hermant (eProseed),
Roel Van den Bergh, Petra Bikkenbergs, Ward Schoonjans (Oracle)

REGISTRATION
events@itone.lu

Oracle Java 8 is Out!

Oracle officially launched the release of Java 8 with some really nice features that includes lambda expressions and streams, compact profiles to deploy applications with only the components required by your application, Java FX becoming full open source, some really cool date and time APIs to support business calendars, Japanese, Buda and Islamic calendars, a flight recorder to monitor performance, Nashorn which is a light-weight yet high performance Javascript runtime built on top of the actual JVM operating with the garbage collector and other JVM components and being able to call Java from Javascript, Java ME embedded to grow the capabilities for IoT (Internet of Things) and the most cool performance feature of them all is eliminating PermGen by having the JVM automatically adjusting the PermSize.

An on-demand replay of the launch will be soon provided along with many video sessions of the new features (http://www.oracle.com/java8launch).
 
Download Java SE 8 and happy hacking!

Using ADF BC Declarative Built-in Rules (Part 1 of 10): Collection Validator

I recently gave an ADF training and realized that many people where having difficulties using the predefined validation rules in ADF Business Components so i decided to write a series of blog posts describing the types of validation available to ADF BC applications.

There are various options for handling validation in ADF applications. You can either define validations on your business service layer or directly on your user interface.

Validations options on your business service layer consist of declarative and programmatic ADF BC validations and validations defined on your database.

Validation options on your user interface consist of built-in validation capabilities on components such as input components and select components. Please make sure though that validations defined on the user interface are also defined on your business service layer to leverage the validations defined on your business service layer when you choose to expose your model in other ways.

Validations can be defined at either the entity level or on a specific attribute. I will be covering in posts that will follow all validation rules. In this post i will explain how you can use the collection validator.

The collection validator is an entity level validator used to compute an aggregate value on an attribute in a child of the current entity object using an aggregate function such as Sum, Count, Average, Min and Max.

I will be using the HR schema to demo the Collection Validator and let's assume the following requirement. A department has a specific budget (let's say 20,000 Euros) comprised of the sum of its employees' salary.

I've created an application, "Collection Validator" using the "Fusion Web Applications (ADF)" template and accepting all the default settings (i just provided my own package name).

I then created the business component objects to use in the collection validator demo which includes two entity objects, one on the "Employees" table and one on the "Departments" table, their respective updatable view objects and an application module. I did all these using the "Business Components from Tables" wizard. And just to tidy up things i refactored all associations into the "associations" package under the "entities" package and refactored all view links into the "links" package under the "views" package.

A collection validator requires an accessor, an association that has been defined for the entity. The "Business Components from Tables" wizard automatically detected the foreign keys defined in the database and created an association for each foreign key, thus all accessor have been created for you automatically. We have two types of associations. The default association type that defines a "soft-type" relationship where entities are related but are not completely dependent and a composition association type that defines a more strict type of association where, in brief, a destination entity is completely dependent on the source.

The collection validator requires a "composition association". I will be using the default association created by the "Business Components from Tables" named "EmpDeptFkAssoc" to mark it as a composite association.

So open the "EmpDeptFkAssoc" association, select the "Relationship" tab and in the "Behavior" section select the check box "Composition Association".

The collection validator will be defined on the "Departments" entity. So open the "Departments" enity and on the "Business Rules" tab, select the "Entity Validators" folder and click on the green plus icon. This will open the "Add Validation" window.

 In the "Type" drop down select the "Collection" validator, in the operation select "Sum" and in the "Accessor" drop down, if you have accepted the default, you should have "Employees1". This is the accessor that got generated from the "EmpDeptFkAssoc" association. In the "Operator" selection i will choose "LessThan" and in the "Compare With" selection i will leave the default which is "Literal Value". In the "Enter Literal Value" box type i will type 20000.

In the "Validation Execution" tab you can control when the validation should be execute (using Groovy expressions which i will cover in another post) and the triggering attributes (to execute the validation only when the selected attribute(s) have been changed).

In the "Failure Handling" tab you can define the severity, either "Error" or "Informational Warning" and the actual failure message. A very cool feature here is tokens. Tokens which are defined in a failure message using the angle brackets {} are placeholders for passing either parameter values or parameter control hints (labels). I've defined the following failure message:

Department {DeptName} has reached it's allowed budget.

JDeveloper automatically detected the "DeptName" token and created it in the "Token Message Expressions" section. In the expression input field just type the name of the department name attribute, "DepartmentName". At runtime this will translate to the actual department name.

Click "OK" to define the business rule and run your Application Module to test the collection validator rule. In the "Business Composer Browser" select the "EmpDeptFkLink1" view link to present the Department record in a form with its Employee records displayed in a detailed table.

Add a new employee in a department and make sure you set the employee's salary to a value that when you sum the salaries of all employees in that department will be greater or equal to 20,000. In my case, i will add a new employee in the "Administration" department with a salary set to 15,600. Click the commit button in the employees detail section and you should get an error with your custom message displayed.

Download sample application: Collection Validator