29.3 Understanding Configuration Property Scopes

Each runtime configuration property used by ADF Business Components has a scope. The scope of each property indicates at what level the property's value is evaluated and whether its value is effectively shared (i.e. static) in a single Java VM, or not. The ADF Business Components PropertyManager class is the registry of all supported properties. It defines the property names, their default values, and their scope. This class contains a main() method so that you can run the class from the command line to see a list of all the configuration property information.

Assuming JDEVHOME is the JDeveloper 10g installation directory, to see this list of settings for reference, do the following:

$ java -cp JDEVHOME/BC4J/lib/bc4jmt.jar oracle.jbo.common.PropertyManager

Issuing this comman will send all of the ADF Business Components configuration properties to the console. It also lists a handy reference about the different levels at which you can set configuration property values and remind you of the precedence order these levels have:

---------------------------------------------------------------
Properties loaded from following sources, in order:
1. Client environment [Provided programmatically
                       or declaratively in bc4j.xcfg]
2. Applet tags
3. -D flags (appear in System.properties)
4. bc4j.properties file (in current directory)
5. /oracle/jbo/BC4J.properties resource
6. /oracle/jbo/commom.jboserver.properties resource
7. /oracle/jbo/common.Diagnostic.properties resource
8. System defined default
---------------------------------------------------------------

You'll see each property is listed with one of the following scopes:

• MetaObjectManager

  Properties at this scope are initialized once per Java VM when the ADF PropertyManager is first initialized.

• SessionImpl

  Properties at this scope are initialized once per invocation of ApplicationModule.prepareSession().

• Configuration

  Properties at this scope are initialized when the ApplicationModule pool is first created and the application module's configuration is read the first time.

• Diagnostic

  Properties at this scope are specific to the built-in ADF Business Components diagnostic facility.

At each of these scopes, the layered value resolution described above is performed when the properties are initialized. Whenever property values are initialized, if you have specified them in the Client Environment (level 1 in the resolution order) the values will take precedence over values specified as System parameters (level 3 in the resolution order).

The Client Environment is a hashtable of name/value pairs that you can either programatically populate, or which will be automatically populated for you by the Configuration object when loaded, with the name/value pairs it contains in its entry in the bc4j.xcfg file. The implication of this is that for any properties scoped at MetaObjectManager level, the most reliable way to ensure that all of your application modules use the same default value for those properties is to do both of the following:

1. Make sure the property value does not appear in any of your application module's bc4j.xcfg file configuration name/value pair entries.

2. Set the property value using a Java system property in your runtime environment.

If, instead, you leave any MetaObjectManager-scoped properties in your bc4j.xcfg files, you will have the undesirable behavior that they will take on the value specified in the configuration of the first application module whose pool gets created after the Java VM starts up.