RichFaces, JPA trial and error

Issue # 1. I wanted to use RichFaces Modal Panel to pop up a login screen and I got an error. Instead of going to login.xhtml, it was giving me file download error like this.

Solution: In my web.xml file I added <welcome-file>index.xhtml</welcome-file>. I had to change index.xhtml to index.html to make it work. I guess application initialization it does not know what is xhtml. Once application get initialized, then it recognizes the xhtml extension.

Issue with Persistence Model: Exception occured in J2EEC Phase
com.sun.enterprise.deployment.backend.IASDeploymentException: Deployment Error — The persistence-context-ref-name [persistence/LogicalName] in module [C:\buildLocal\WebDMS\build\web] resolves to a persistence unit called [WebDMSModelPU] which is of type RESOURCE_LOCAL. Only persistence units with transaction type JTA can be used as a container managed entity manager. Please verify your application.

Jason: Drop the type=”" (?) decl from your persistence declaration, or change it to JTA
OR stop using injection to get your EntityManager

Jason: <persistence-unit name=”WebDMSModelPU” transaction-type=”JTA”> or <persistence-unit name=”WebDMSModelPU”>
JTA is the default. if you have “RESOURCE_LOCAL”, that tells JPA that you will handle txn mgmt yourself. a container-managed EM can’t work in that… mode

So here is my workable persistence.xml looks like:

<persistence version="1.0" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence/persistence_1_0.xsd">
<persistence-unit name="WebDMSModelPU" transaction-type="JTA">
<provider>oracle.toplink.essentials.PersistenceProvider</provider>
<jta-data-source>jdbc/dms</jta-data-source>
<class>webdmsmodel.model.Project</class>
<class>webdmsmodel.model.ProjEpf</class>
<class>webdmsmodel.model.ProjType</class>
</persistence-unit>
</persistence>

More details on this issue: David’s blog, JSF ForumIssue 3: This was very weired. My accordion image was not showing up when I did a hot deployment to the development server from my local machine. But it worked on the local machine.

Solution: It worked after spent couple hours. I had to re start our development application server
SJSAS 9.1 UR 1) to see the change.Issue # 4: Scrollable Data Table wont render data.

<rich:scrollableDataTable  id="projectTable" var="project" value="#{controller.projectList}" first="0" rows="20">

Solution: I was returning a DataModel instead of List. I assume, scrollable data table does not work with DataModel.2 cents from Jason: I’ve never used DataModel, always using a List. Internally, dataTable will convert a List to a ListDataModel, for what that’s worth. Apparently, I lose some things by not using a DataModel, but I’m not sure what that is yet. :)HH: I must say that RichFaces is such a sweet JSF component libraries to work with. Awesome. Full credit goes to Jason Lee, who introduced me with it. I have tried Sun’s Woodstock and few other libraries, but RichFaces has the best documentations, it is very easy to use and more frequently version updates.