ANN: Soliciting Input for Step-by-step BC4J+DAC/JSP Examples

Question

All,
We are looking for user input to guide our current work on writing additional examples and "how to" tutorials for the next major JDeveloper release.
Feedback here in the forum from other discussion threads provides ample motivation that these additional "how to" topics are needed, so here we're looking to get down to the specifics.
The four key areas that appear to need more meaty examples are:[list][*]Exploiting Business Components to Model Applications[*]Building Real-world DataBound Java Swing GUI's with the additional DAC framework, on top of BC4J business components.[*]Building Real-world, DataBound JSP GUI's with the additional JSP DataTags tag library, on top of BC4J business components, and possibly[*]Working with inbound and outbound XML messages on top of BC4J business components.[list]
These should encompass the basics of multi-form/page applications as well as user authentication as well.
If you have opinions on the specifics of any of these topics that you would like covered, have additional "big-ticket" topics that are missing from this list, or have common use cases that our current documentation has not helped you with, please chime in on this thread.
Steve Muench
Lead Product Manager, BC4J

Answer 1

The most important thing is that the examples should demonstrate how to customize the wizard-generated code. I agree that the 3.2 documentation is a bit better in this regard. Nevertheless what I would have liked when I started on this rocky road is:
(1) Working code demonstrating use of all widgets e.g. LOV, dropdown lists, checkboxes, etc.
(2) Examples that step through all the tabs on the EditObject wizards e.g. what happens if I set the ViewObject property DESCRIPTION?
(3) On a related tip, the underlying base tables should have real world column names e.g. EMP_NO rather than EMPNO (I realise that altering the SCOTT schema is sacrilegeous and I'm not actually suggesting it, but you are introducing new tables). This particular issue would have revealed the bug in the _LABEL property early on.
(4) Instructions on doing programmatic defaulting and validation would be useful.
(5) I second kirkk's advice about CRUD - the Data Tag example was particularly bad in this respect.
The key problem with the documentation is context. There are lots of code snippets in the syntax pages but other there's no explanation of why we should use it.