Zheng Tech Blog

This post will cover the coding details of implementing an ADF XML menu model. Do you need to manage all your navigation menus in a centralized file including its label, URL, title and other custom attributes you may have? If so, the solution is to use ADF XML menu model. ADF XML menu  model is the same concept as the built in WebCenter Navigation Model in Oracle WebCenter Portal. It uses a XML file to hold the navigation metadata - id, label, title, destination/url and other custom attributes you may need. The XML file is the data model layer. Using XML menu, you can generate various kinds of navigation user interface components, such as navigation links, bars, tabs, breadcrumbs, etc. You can also apply business logic to conditionally control the rendering of the navigation menu. The business logic including security can be applied at either the XML model layer or the UI presentation layer depending on where it fits your purpose. You can create multiple navigation hierarchy...

In WebCenter Portal, you can define the URL parameter name/value pair in the URL parameters section in the Navigation Model. When you do that, the name/value pair will be added to the URL as a query string, such as "?name=value". As the header suggests, the URL parameter in the Navigation Model of WebCenter Portal application cannot be a NULL object. If the URL parameter is a static value, then it's not a concern. In case there is a need to dynamically populate the URL parameter in the navigation model, it's important to make sure the dynamical value cannot be NULL object. Because when the value is NULL, the navigation model does NOT know how to construct the query string. Note the NULL object is not equivalent to empty string. In this case, WebCenter Portal will not able to recognize the requested URL. In such case, it will redirect to the application context root which will induce the index page or whatever page you have define as the default page to render...

In the Navigation Model of a WebCenter Portal application (11g), there is an option to define a navigation resource by "external link". In a normal case, you should NOT define any internal JSPX page using this option, but only if there is a need to navigate to a third party site - by what the name means, an external link. The internal JSPX page should be added to the Navigation Model by the "page" type. The impact of defining internal JSPX page as an external link is, the redundant memory footprint due to the ADF control state token recreations every time this external link is clicked. ADF control token is an identifier used by the Controller to track user's state so that all in process task flows for the same user can be retrieved. Normally, this ADF control state should be not recreated for the same user. With the external link type, the navigation behaves like entering the application in a blank new context so every navigation with external link type will ...