GlobalMenu with dynamically binding buttons

Question

My boss has said she would like something and I am trying to figure out what it would take to make it happen, so I can push for the right course of action...hopefully.
We are starting to try and change our forms applications to ADF BC/JSF applications.
Right now it seems my boss would like me to make the ADF applications "feel" like forms apps.
To that end, she wants me to make the background gray, etc, so the users are more comfortable making the transition.
The last item she posed was to make a iconic button bar at the top, which would contain (among other things) action buttons which would apply to whatever block the field that has focus is in.
So I imagine there would be a fair amount of java/javascript coding to make this happen.
I would guess that these buttons would go in the menuGlobal facet and be unbound to any binding layer items...or maybe default ones.
I would also expect that there would be action bindings that you could tie into.
Then when they are clicked, a backing bean method would somehow know what the focus was when the button was pressed. (I can imagine how to do this in JavaScript with onfocus events; so maybe I could do this part in JavaScript, and write the current item in focus to a field which the backing bean would see when the unbound action button was pressed.)
So in the backing bean we would have the name of the field in focus, and I can imagine traversing lists or a structures that would show the fields on the page, and what iterator binding they were attached to. And finally what action bindings were associated with that iterator and which one applied to the button pressed based on its value (or something).
Then I would imagine that you would run an operation binding by constructing an el expression from the in-focus-field value passed in.
So my questions are technical and non-technical:
1. does this seem like the easiest way to do this sort of thing, or are there simpler or more declarative ways to do this?
2. from a development process perspective does this seem sane? I mean, when I first was learning forms (in 1990), our boss wanted to make the form do something that it was not really designed to do easily. I would say that project failed because of it. I do not want to make the same mistake here. On the other hand we could reuse this code and build it into our development standards, and then the current users (there are many) would really not have anything new to fathom.
I would appreciate any thoughts.
Michael F.

Answer 1

My boss has said she would like something and I am trying to figure out what it would take to make it happen, so I can push for the right course of action...hopefully.
We are starting to try and change our forms applications to ADF BC/JSF applications.
Right now it seems my boss would like me to make the ADF applications "feel" like forms apps.
To that end, she wants me to make the background gray, etc, so the users are more comfortable making the transition.
The last item she posed was to make a iconic button bar at the top, which would contain (among other things) action buttons which would apply to whatever block the field that has focus is in.
So I imagine there would be a fair amount of java/javascript coding to make this happen.
I would guess that these buttons would go in the menuGlobal facet and be unbound to any binding layer items...or maybe default ones.
I would also expect that there would be action bindings that you could tie into.
Then when they are clicked, a backing bean method would somehow know what the focus was when the button was pressed. (I can imagine how to do this in JavaScript with onfocus events; so maybe I could do this part in JavaScript, and write the current item in focus to a field which the backing bean would see when the unbound action button was pressed.)
So in the backing bean we would have the name of the field in focus, and I can imagine traversing lists or a structures that would show the fields on the page, and what iterator binding they were attached to. And finally what action bindings were associated with that iterator and which one applied to the button pressed based on its value (or something).
Then I would imagine that you would run an operation binding by constructing an el expression from the in-focus-field value passed in.
So my questions are technical and non-technical:
1. does this seem like the easiest way to do this sort of thing, or are there simpler or more declarative ways to do this?
2. from a development process perspective does this seem sane? I mean, when I first was learning forms (in 1990), our boss wanted to make the form do something that it was not really designed to do easily. I would say that project failed because of it. I do not want to make the same mistake here. On the other hand we could reuse this code and build it into our development standards, and then the current users (there are many) would really not have anything new to fathom.
I would appreciate any thoughts.
Michael F.