Deploy your ADF UIX applications to WebLogic

Just a quick blogpost how you can deploy your old ADF UIX ( 10.1.2)  applications to the WebLogic 11g ( 10.3.5 ) application server. Off course this is not supported by Oracle, who cares, your old 10.1.2 OC4J container is also end of life.  When it works, it works :-)

First you need to create a JDBC DataSource in the WebLogic Console.

You need to use the oracle.jdbc.OracleDriver driver class ( don't use XA, disable global commit ) else you will get some strange oracle BLOB errors.

Set Statement cache size to 0 ( in the connection pool Tab of the datasource )

also in the advanced options of the datasource you should de-select Wrap Data Types.
By default, data type objects for Array, Blob, Clob, NClob, Ref, SQLXML, and Struct, plus ParameterMetaData and ResultSetMetaData objects are wrapped with a WebLogic wrapper.


If you don't do this then ADF BC ( BC4J ) can't do its passivation in the ps_txn table ( this contains a BLOB datatype) and your applications behaves very strange
or you can set jbo.passivationstore to file


Next step is to make a shared library ( just use a war template ), For this I use an exploded folder so I can easily add and remove some jars.

I have a folder called adf.uix ( or a war with this name )

Folder META-INF
   File MANIFEST.MF with the following content

     Manifest-Version: 1.0
     Extension-Name: adf.uix
     Specification-Title: adf.uix
     Specification-Version: 1.0
     Implementation-Version: 10.1.2


Folder WEB-INF
  A empty web.xml file with the following content

     <?xml version = '1.0' encoding = 'windows-1252'?>
     <!DOCTYPE web-app PUBLIC "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD Web Application 2.3//EN"     "http://java.sun.com/dtd/web-app_2_3.dtd">
     <web-app>
     </web-app>

  

  Folder lib with all the 10.1.2 jars which I needed.

Deploy the shared library to WebLogic.

Next step is to unpack the war of your uix application ( we don't need the ear )

We need to create a weblogic deployment descriptor called weblogic.xml and put this in the WEB-INF folder. ( you can delete the orion one )

This weblogic descriptor contains a reference to our just created shared library. Also set the WEB-INF/lib as preferred classloading.


<?xml version = '1.0' encoding = 'windows-1252'?>
<weblogic-web-app xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
     xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/weblogic-web-app
     http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/weblogic-web-app/1.0/weblogic-web-app.xsd"
     xmlns="http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/weblogic-web-app">
  <container-descriptor>
    <prefer-web-inf-classes>true</prefer-web-inf-classes>
  </container-descriptor>
  <library-ref>
    <library-name>adf.uix</library-name>
  </library-ref>
</weblogic-web-app>

This is the content of my WEB-INF/lib folder 

Zip everything to a new war file or use the exploded folder.

When you use jdk1.6 or higher you can set -Djava.awt.headless=true so cabo uix does not need X-Windows or Windows desktop to generate gif images.

And when you don't see the images then you should also use an exploded folder instead of a war so cabo uix has a file path to store the generated images. Or make an UIX configuration class which contains cabo paths to a folder of the weblogic server.

Deploy the war or exploded folder  to weblogic, test it and delete your own OC4J Container.