Changing Skin Version using ADF Shared Library

Using Andrejus's blog about Deploying ADF Applications as Shared Libraries on WLS, I tried to make a shared skin library. I'll try to make this blog quick as Andrejus's blog already says it all.

The only thing I'm trying to figure out though, is how to make the main Running Application change or point to the new Library version without having the need to stop it.

To start with, I created a simple application which already utilizes shared taskflow libraries.

MainApplication - Default

Next I'll create a separate application which contains the CSS file as well as the Trinidad definition (trinidad-skins.xml). We need to create a separate project mainly so that we can deploy it as a shared library which requires it to be a WAR.

sharedDefault.css - Let's keep it simple and obvious, for testing anyway hehe.

Default Shared Skin Project

trinidad-skins.xml

MANIFEST.MF

Shared Skin Library - Deployment Profiles

I created a WAR for my shared library, and an ADF Jar for the application using it. Just a key thing needed for the WAR to work correctly as a shared library, you'll need to configure the MANIFEST as well as the ContextRoot.

WAR Context Root to Empty

MANIFEST.MF Included

So, after running our main application through JDeveloper, we'll get as expected our green screen.

Integrated Run

So that we can see what we could expect when things go wrong, let's try deploying our shared library and deploy our application as well as an EAR without configuring the library reference.

Filter the skin library as part of deployment files

Deployment in Weblogic Console

Here's our FAILED attempt #1.

Console Warning

Failed Attempt

So as you can see, worst thing that could happen is that your application will use simple skin because it can't find the skin you want.

So for this, what we're missing is the weblogic.xml entry for the library-ref. Let's add it now and re-run our page.

weblogic-xml

SUCCESS