Update model, even when required field(s) is/are empty

Question

Hello,
A rather exotic question. :-) EDIT: using JDEV 11.1.1.4
Suppose you have a form that consists of inputTexts and some of them are required (required = true). These come from a data control that is based on a BPM Human Task.
What my customer wants is two buttons: one submit button, and one save button.
The submit button behaves normally: when a required field is not entered, a validation error is shown.
The save button on the other hand, will perform a model update without complaining, even though some required fields could be empty. This would be the Save operation on the BPM Data Control: the values that the user entered are saved (in the BPM engine), but the process does not continue. It's like saving a draft version of the fields you entered, so you can continue filling in the form for example the next day.
How can I achieve this? Where I have gotten so far:
*) If I do not make the "Save" button "immediate", then the client side validation will keep on complaining about the empty required fields.
*) If I make the "Save" button "immediate", then the client side validation is skipped. But the Update Model Values phase is also not executed, so values that the user entered are not stored in BPM. Too bad.
My plan now is making the button immediate, and then overriding page life cycle in case the Save button is pressed. I already created my own implementation of oracle.adf.controller.v2.lifecycle.PagePhaseListener. In the afterPhase() method, I then wanted to check if the current phase is the "Apply request Values" phase (if the button is immediate, then this is the last phase before the "Render Response" phase), and if so, manually call the updateModelValues phase, like this:
    public void afterPhase(PagePhaseEvent pagePhaseEvent) {
        int id = pagePhaseEvent.getPhaseId();
        if(pagePhaseEvent.getPhaseId() == 10 && <user has clicked the SAVE button, not the Submit button>){ // APPLY REQ VALUES
          LifecycleContext ctx = pagePhaseEvent.getLifecycleContext().getCurrentInstance();
          ctx.getPageController().processUpdateModel(ctx);
    }The <user has clicked the SAVE button, not the Submit button> condition will be done through a variable on session scope that is set to true/false depending on the button (save or submit) that was pressed, by using a setActionListener on that button.
Unfortunately, the model is still not updated and I'm kind of stuck... Can anyone help me?
Am I barking up the wrong tree and can this be done a lot easier, or what am I missing?
Thanks a lot!
Edited by: user13805808 on Jan 31, 2011 6:29 AM

Answer 1

Hello Frank,
Thanks for your quick reply.
The application is actually a bounded task flow that is based on a human task. So after selecting the human task, JDev automatically creates a task flow, and the Data Controls required to show, update, reject, approve, ... the task.
What I do next is drag & drop the payload of the task from the Data Control Palette to my page, and I create buttons for all the necessary operations (such as approve, reject, ...), also from the Data Control Palette. If you then deploy the application, it is automatically associated with the human task, and the page is shown in the Worklist application after selecting an instance of the task.
The operation that I am interested in is called "update", which basically, through the ADF Data Control and ADF model, sends the updated fields back to the BPM engine and saves the updated fields there (in memory, or in the DB, I don't know, but this doesn't matter). This operation is provided by default when creating a task flow based on a human task, and works perfectly if there are no required fields, or if all required fields are submitted. So "temporarily" saving the fields is not the issue.
What I want to achieve now, is have some fields that are required when the user clicks "approve" (one of the basic operations on a task), but optional with the user clicks "update" (another basic operation of a task). Approve would make the process itself continue and the task would no longer be assigned to the user. Update on the other hand would just update the payload in the BPM engine, but the task remains assigned to the user and the process doesn't continue. So if the user logs in at some point later in time, this task (with updated fields) will still be available in his inbox.
The first thing I noticed is that client side validation cannot be disabled anymore in ADF 11g, so the "update" button has to be set to immediate to avoid the validation of the required fields at client side. But if the "update" button is immedate, then the update model values phase in the page life cycle is skipped, so the data that the user entered is never submitted to BPM. Whereas if I set the "update" button to immedate="false", this works just fine. If all required fields are entered, that is. :-)
So - in my opinion - there would be 2 possible approaches if there are fields that should be required for the "approve" operation and optional for the "update" operation.
- Disable the client side validation and don't set the update button to immediate
- Make the "update" button immediate, but force the lifecycle to still perform Update Model Values, if the "update" button is used
The second approach would be the cleanest, but I'm unable to figure out how to do this... I'm a little bit lost in all the classes that are available. :-)
I hope this clarifies my problem...
Regards,
Chris
Edited by: ChrisSchryvers on Feb 1, 2011 4:21 AM