Personalization using MDS in Oracle ADF

Personalization for the users is the most wanted features in Enterprise applications nowadays. This gives user good experience and makes him to decide what and how he needs to see things in Enterprise Applications .

This post we will see how can we do User level Personalizations in Oracle ADF Applications and steps to configure it.

Example uses Jdev 11.1.1.7. Lets get started !


Created a simple ADF Application. Created BC from HR schema consist of EmployeesEO/VO and DepartmentsEO/VO and AppModule.

Implemented ADF Security. This is required since we are doing personalization for a particular user



Now first step is enabling MDS between the sessions. This is done on View Controller project .

ViewController -> Properties ->ADF View -> Enable User Customizations.

By default it is between the sessions, since we need to make it between the session, one needs to check Across the Sessions using MDS.

So now it is enabled across the sessions using MDS.


Next thing to configure is adf-config.xml . This file has all the information about what Layers are defined for Personalizations and what are the components and their attributes will be persisted to MDS store.

First is adding User Layer.

Open adf-config.xml -> MDS Configuration. Click on green icon and search for UserCC.

UserCC provides user level customization. All the changes which a user makes for MDS enabled component, are store for that particular user in MDS Store.

Refere UserCC documentation : http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E41362_01/apirefs.1111/e10686/oracle/adf/share/config/UserCC.html

Ok So we are done with enabling MDS in our application as well as defining UserCC Layer.

Now next thing is to define, what components and attributes will get persisted to MDS Store.

On the View option in adf-config.xml , we need to add Tags and Tag Attributes. Tags are components which will be participating in MDS persistence. Tag Attributes are attributes of the Tags which will be getting saved to MDS Store.

So in Tags lets add Table and Column. When you click on green add icon, there will be list of components :

After adding table below is how it looks :

After adding Tags, there will be default tag attributes which will get added.

Lets also add column in Tags.

Persist changes simply depicts whether attributes state will be stored in MDS or not.

So now we are all set. Lets create a page in View Controller project with a table out of EmployeesVO.

After this lets deploy the application.

On deployment, there is a Deployment Configuration window which comes up. 

This is a option where you need to select MDS Store. MDS Store can be of two types. One is Database and other is local file system. For now we will use local file system. So selected second option.

On running the page, ADF security asks for username to login. User user name testuser1 in this case to login first. 

On login use is greeted with table. 

Now lets do some changes to columns. Lets remove any particular column. Lets remove first column which is employee id.

Now Logout and login again with same user. One can see below that Employee id column is not shown on the table.

But this change will be there only for this user. Lets Login with some other user.

You can see below that for this user, Employee Id column is there.

So our Personalization is working for a particular user :)

Now lets see what is happening behind the scenes.

Since we used file based MDS, all the personalizations for every user is store in file system. It creates a folder for each user that performs Personalization.
They are by defaul stored at :
C:\Users<username>\AppData\Roaming\JDeveloper\system11.1.1.7.40.64.93\o.mds.dt\adrs\UserMDSApp\AutoGeneratedMar\mds_adrs_writedir\mdssys\cust\user\robertlewallen

We can see that there is a xml file which is of our page which user modified. Changes of this page is persisted in this xml file UserMDSTest.jspx.xml.

For every user which performs personalization and which are added to MDS, there will be a folder with that user name. Inside the user name , there will be xml for all the pages which that user has modified. These changes will be applied at runtime on top of normal rendering of the page thus resulting of personalized output.

If we open this XML and see the contents , it shows as below :

One can see that
   <mds:modify element="c4">
      <mds:attribute name="visible" value="false"/>
   </mds:modify>

Here c4 is id of column which is made invisible and attribute 'visible' is made to false.

In next posts on MDS we will see how to add attributes which are not specified by default for a component. Also we will take a look how we can save attributes programmatically. 

Hope this was usefull !!

Thanks