Navigating among task flows

Question

From a button which is in a region on a page (and therefore belongs to a task flow based on page fragments), how can we go about calling a page which belongs to another separate task flow (this one not being based on page fragments)? Is there a declarative way to do this? Is there a programmatic way to do this? Either way, giving or pointing to existing examples would be very helpful. Thank you.

Answer 1

There is a declarative approach for calling a page (not a page fragment) from a button within a region using what's called a task flow "URL View" activity. It will navigate the page containing the region to the new page. Therefore, the new page will not appear within the context of the region. Here's some more information on task flow URL View activities:
A task flow URL View Activity redirects the root view port to any URL addressable resource, even from within the context of an ADF Region. Possible URL addressable resources include ADF Bounded Task Flows, View Activities in ADF Unbounded Task Flows, and addresses external to the current web application (e.g. Google Search). When the URL View Activity is executed at runtime, its corresponding URL EL expression will be evaluated to get the appropriate URL. Any parameter value EL expressions will be evaluated and their resulting values will be added to the URL. Then the client will be redirected to the corresponding URL.
A URL View Activity will redirect the client regardless of which view port the URL View Activity is executed from (root view port or an ADF Region). This differs from using a regular View Activity with a <redirect> element since the <redirect> element of View Activities is ignored within the context of an ADF Region. It is only honored if the View Activity is within the root view port.
Redirecting elsewhere within the same application will be handled similar to a back button navigation since the task flow stack will get cleaned up. Redirecting out of the web application will be handled like dereferencing a URL to a site external to the application. Therefore, a URL View Activity is not always expected to redirect the whole page. When running with in a portal environment, redirects to external URLs (e.g. www.google.com) will redirect the whole page while redirects to resources within the same web application (e.g. /context/faces/some-view) will redirect just the portlet, not the whole portal page.
When constructing a URL for use in a URL View Activity, the URL can be constructed using one of the following approaches:
* By calling ControllerContext.getLocalViewActivityURL()
* By calling ControllerContext.getGlobalViewActivityURL() passing in the target viewId
* Be a fully qualified, absolute URL
* Be a URL relative to the current view (doesn't start with a '/')