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A Little About Jason Bennett ...

I've had an interest in publishing technical articles and HELPFUL code for a few years. I am (by trade and hobby) a developer who specializes in Oracle technologies and web based architectures. I have been an employee of both TUSC and Oracle Corporation. My intent here is to share my ideas and coding experiences with the developer community as a whole. As with all developers some of my ideas are great and some of them are .... well you know. Anyway, I hope you find something here that will aid in your endeavor, or spark a new idea.
I am more than happy to assist with technical issues and will even write a little code if need be. If you find something on the site that is really useful and you'd like to make a contribution (absolutely up to you and absolutely not required), just click the "Make a Donation" button on the left!
Good luck and good coding !

	Monday, July 23, 2007

Oracle ADF Faces Tip: How to hide the Asterisk (*) when the "required" Property is Set to "true"

If this one is common knowledge, then forgive me. I just jumped into ADF and JSF a few weeks ago (I was a STRUTS man), and am drinking from the firehose! There is a property on some of the ADF Faces components (inputText, selectOneChoice, etc ...) called "required". If set to true, this property will ensure that the user enters a value for the item (in DB terms, it makes the field a NOT NULL field). This is a convenient feature with one small exception. Setting the property to true places a green asterisk(*) on the left side of the data entry item. The asterisk appears whether you want it to or not and there is no option/property available for turning it off (NOTE: This is an ADF inputText feature, not a standard JSF inputText feature). This is an issue if your development standards say to put an asterisk on the RIGHT side of the input field (as mine do).

The solution to the problem was fairly straight forward. Since I had implemented a custom skin for this ADF Faces application and created a custom CSS document (see this article by Jonas Jacobi), I simply over-rode the existing style for the required icon with this one:

.AFRequiredIconStyle { display:none }

Presto! No more little green asterisk.

6:23:15 PM