Checking ADF BC Transaction Status

There is a very common use case when we need to programmatically check if the current transaction is dirty and notify a user about that. The most common approach is to get an instance of the current data control frame or a data control and check their isTransactionDirty() and isTransactionModified() methods.

For example, like this:

    private boolean isTransactionDirty() {
        BindingContext context = BindingContext.getCurrent();
        DataControlFrame dcFrame = context.dataControlFrame();               
        return dcFrame.isTransactionDirty();
    }

Or like this:

    private boolean isTransactionDirty() {
        BindingContext context = BindingContext.getCurrent();
        DCBindingContainer binding = (DCBindingContainer) context.getCurrentBindingsEntry();
        DCDataControl dc = binding.getDataControl();      

        return dc.isTransactionDirty();       

        //or       

        return dc.isTransactionModified();       

        //or       

        return dc.isTransactionDirty() || dc.isTransactionModified();       
    }

Note, that in the second example both isTransactionDirty() and isTransactionModified() methods are used. In the good old days, when people worked with 11g, the isTransactionDirty() method checked the underlying model if it was dirty (basically if ADF BC transaction was dirty). The isTransactionModified() has never done that, it's been always checking its internal flag only which is useful when it comes to a non-transactional data control (e.g. been data control). Having those both methods was nice as it gave some flexibility and you could use either of them (or both) depending on what you were actually checking.

Nowadays (12c) isTransactionDirty() is combined with isTransactionModified(), so it checks the internal flag (which is set up whenever any data bound value is changed) and the underlying model transaction and returns true if either of them is true. Having said that, you are not able anymore to use isTransactionDirty() to check if ADF BC transaction is dirty.

Let's say there is a transient view object and you use it on your screen for some temporary values (e.g. implementing custom filtering or a form with input values for a business service method). Since those values are data bound (even though they have nothing to do with ADF BC entity cache) the framework will mark the internal data control flag as dirty whenever the values are changed. So, isTransactionDirty() method in 12c is going to return true. The user didn't do anything bad yet, and we are scaring them with the notification about dirty transaction.

The solution is to override the method in the data control. You can see how to tell the framework to use a custom data control here. So, in our custom data control we are going to override isTransactionDirty() method:

    //We consider transaction as dirty only if BC transaction is dirty
    //all manipulations with transient VOs/attributes should not matter
    @Override
    public boolean isTransactionDirty()  {
       ApplicationModule am = getApplicationModule();
       return (am != null
                  && am.getTransaction() != null
                  && am.getTransaction().isDirty());
    }

That's it!

ADF BC. Working with custom data control.

It is highly recommended to create our custom set of subclasses of the framework BC base classes and to build our BC model on the top of them. This gives us a certain flexibility and ability to control what's going on. But sometimes it would be cool to have our own extension at the middle layer, I mean the data control layer. A wide range of tricks can be done having a custom data control. I've already blogged about some and definitely will blog about many more. A lot of ADF developers are a bit scared of this technique and consider it as something from the dark side. But actually it's a very easy technique despite the power it gives to developers.

So, you have to make the following steps:

Create custom data control class:
It is recommended to use JUApplication as a base class for your custom data control:

public class AgileDataControl extends JUApplication
{
...

Override the desired methods:

  @Override
  protected void applySortCriteria(DCIteratorBinding iter,
                                   SortCriteria[] sortBy) {
     //Some job

    }

Create custom data control factory returning the class name of your custom data control:

public class AgileDataControlFactory extends DataControlFactoryImpl
{
  @Override
  protected String getDataControlClassName() {
          return AgileDataControl.class.getName();
      } 
}

Specify custom data control factory in the DataBindings.cpx file:

<BC4JDataControl id="AgileDataModelServiceDataControl"
                     Package="agiledatamodel"
                    FactoryClass="agiledatamodel.datacontrol.AgileDataControlFactory"
                     ...

Enjoy!
 
That's it!