Extensions and personalizations

Question

I am new to jdeveloper and its nuances so this may be straightforward. I have a need to just change an xml page, no logic on the page just have to hide a field that is set to be rendered irrespective and there is no method to make rendered false without editing the underlying XML. I know that I have to do this in jdeveloper. However when i am importing it, am I going to need to copy over the original page or is there a substitution section? do i put it in a custom folder? I don't see anything clear cut in the forums or the manuals. I realise (or at least think i do) that you need to substitute, so you don't get rid of the original logic, if you are making changes to the logic of the page by extending the java classes.

Answer 1

There are three kinds of requirements which might arise as part of customizations,
1. Change the look and feel of the Oracle seeded pages(this might include change any UI properties like rendered, CSS styles, required, read only, etc)
- You should use personalization only to do this. You should not manually modify the xml files.
2. Modify or add some functionality in Oracle seeded pages(eg adding/modifying business rules, adding new regions(static or dynamic) etc). This might need the use of personalization and extensions together.
- you should use personalizations to add or modify anything in the UI. If something is not supported through personalization or you want to add some complex region in to your page then create the region as standalone in jdeveloper with OAExt and use personalization to add a stackLayout and attach your regionthrough extends property(however you need to wrap your region which you create in jdev in a stackLayout to do this). You can alternately use flexibleLayout to add any region directly using personalization.
- In addition to adding or modifying the UI if you need to wire the widget to a datasource then you need extensions to create or extend existing business objects and then fill appropriate properties (like viewusage, viewattribute) when you create the UI using personalization, create substitutions and deploy them.
3. Creating new pages or modules
- You should use jdeveloper with OAExt to create new pages and deploy them as Oracle developers do it.
However these are three broad categories and your requirements would either fall in one or more areas in these or outside these areas. If you have any specific requirement we can let you know how best to implement it. What is specified in the developer guide are frequently and commonly used examples, it is difficult to cover every possible use case which can arise as part of customizations. The developer guide and personalization guide specifies best ways to implement the above mentioned three categories and you should first make yourself comfortable with these terminologies and implementations so it will be easier to map your requirements to one of these easily.
Another thumb rule you need to remember is,
- any changes which you can do by manually modifying the xml file can be done using personalizations, if there is some restriction which is preventing you from using personalization like the adminPersonalizable flag is turned off by developer then you can achieve them using code extensions.
- you should use extension mechanism to modify/add new business rules, create and wire new attributes to the new fileds etc.
Anything done using personalization and extensions are upgrade safe.