Apache OFBiz Cookbook - All IT eBooks

300 Pages·2010·6.19 MB·English

Apache OFBiz Cookbook
Over 60 simple but incredibly effective recipes for taking
control of OFBiz
Ruth Hoffman
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Apache OFBiz Cookbook
Copyright © 2010 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the
publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the
information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without
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dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be
caused directly or indirectly by this book.
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companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals.
However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: September 2010
Production Reference: 1020910
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
32 Lincoln Road
Olton
Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-847199-18-8
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Harmeet Singh ([email protected])
Credits
Author Editorial Team Leader
Ruth Hoffman Mithun Sehgal
Reviewers Project Team Leader
Adrian Crum Ashwin Shetty
Shi Jinghai
Project Coordinator
Acquisition Editor Joel Goveya
Chaitanya Apte
Proofreader
Development Editor Jonathan Todd
Rakesh Shejwal
Graphics
Technical Editor Geetanjali Sawant
Vanjeet D'souza
Production Coordinator
Indexer Arvindkumar Gupta
Hemangini Bari
Cover Work
Arvindkumar Gupta
About the Author
Ruth Hoffman is an OFBiz evangelist with over 25 years of information technology
experience, including stints in software design and development, training, project
management, product marketing, and software sales, She has dedicated the last few
years of her eventful career to furthering the OFBiz vision. Whether it be writing about
OFBiz, providing implementation and OFBiz consulting services, or just "kicking the OFBiz
tires" for each new release, she enjoys working with and telling the world about all that
this amazing ERP software suite has to offer.
Ruth's current passion is her quest to provide high quality, cost effective OFBiz training
and documentation. She has pursued this quest through multiple channels, including the
OFBiz website. She invites everyone to stop by, take a gander, and give some feedback at
http://www.myofbiz.com
As a long-standing supporter of OFBiz, she has authored several other OFBiz titles,
including OFBiz E-Commerce Out-Of-The-Box and The OFBiz Catalog Manager. For more
information, please see: http://www.myofbiz.com.
I would like to thank my partner, JC, for being so patient and understanding,
my daughter for not getting too upset when I cancelled our planned Lilac
Festival adventure, and my dog Sadie for sitting by me all those long hours
when no one else would.

Also, my sincerest thanks go to Adrian Crum and Shi Jinghai for their
dedicated efforts in providing technical reviews of this book. Thanks for
keeping me honest and setting me straight on a number of occasions. Your
contributions are greatly appreciated!
About the Reviewers
Adrian Crum is an IT Manager/Computer programmer for a company that builds
homes. Prior to that, he owned and operated a computer retail/service/consulting
business. He was Technical Editor of Coast Compute Magazine, and a contributing writer
for Programmer's Journal. Adrian has been involved with the Apache OFBiz project as a
contributing programmer since 2004, and he is a member of the Project Management
Committee. His extensive experience in many programming languages and cross-platform
development has been a key part of his contributions to the Apache OFBiz project.
Shi Jinghai graduated from Tsinghua University in 1991. In 2001, he took part in the
China 2G Citizen Card Project and became an important system designer of the National
Citizen Identity Information System of China. In 2004, he started his own company
(Beijing Langhua Ltd.) focusing on IT services based on some excellent open source
projects such as OFBiz, OpenCms, JBoss Portal, and Jasig CAS among others.

Table of Contents
Preface 1
Chapter 1: Getting Started 7
Introduction 7
Getting the project code 9
Getting code from the Subversion repository 12
Fixing IP port collision errors 14
The JAVA_HOME setting 17
"Class Not Found" errors 18
Installation verification 20
SSL verification 22
Running JUnit tests 25
Locating an OFBiz Component 26
Locating an OFBiz Application 28
Chapter 2: Java Development 31
Introduction 32
Java runtime CLASSPATH 32
Java compile time CLASSPATH 33
Naming conventions 34
Writing OFBiz Java Events 35
Writing OFBiz Java Services 39
Debugging using the logfile 42
Calling OFBiz Services from a Java program 43
Getting and validating request parameters (Events) 45
Getting and validating request parameters (Services) 47
Managing error messages 48
Using Java properties files 50
Sending e-mail from an OFBiz Event or Service 51
Handling XML files 53
Table of Contents
Chapter 3: The User Interface 57
Introduction 57
Creating HTML web pages 58
Adding actions to Screen widgets 63
HTML markup in Screen widgets 65
CSS styling in Screen widgets 66
Platform-specific widgets 68
OFBiz Tree widgets 69
OFBiz Menu widgets 71
OFBiz Form widgets 72
Creating web pages using FreeMarker 74
Passing Screen widget parameters to FreeMarker 77
Calling Java methods from FreeMarker 78
Forcing FreeMarker to render HTML markup 79
Uploading files in FreeMarker forms 79
Chapter 4: OFBiz Services 83
Introduction 83
Managing existing OFBiz Services 85
Calling a Service from an HTML form 86
Calling asynchronous Services from HTML forms 89
Calling a Service many times from an HTML form 91
Creating a new Service definition file 92
Creating a new Service definition 93
Implementing Services 94
Defining Service attributes (INPUT/OUTPUT) 95
Service Event Condition Actions 96
Service groups 98
Handling Service errors 100
Writing Groovy Services 102
Mail Event Condition Actions 104
Entity Event Condition Actions 106
Chapter 5: The OFBiz Entity Engine 111
Introduction 111
Changing the default database 113
Connecting to a remote database 119
Connecting to multiple databases 120
Creating entity groups 121
Disabling automatic database checks 123
Mapping database data types 123
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Table of Contents
Creating a new entity model 126
Modifying an existing entity model 130
Building a view-entity 132
Chapter 6: OFBiz Security 137
Introduction 137
Securing communications ports 138
Disabling demonstration user accounts 141
Protecting OFBiz web pages 142
Creating user accounts 144
Protecting applications using security groups 147
Protecting views ("Tarpitting") 152
Retrieving forgotten passwords 154
Changing your password 156
Adding or changing SSL certificates 157
OFBiz single sign-on and the external login key 160
Chapter 7: WebTools 163
Introduction 163
Cache maintenance 164
Changing debug settings 167
Exporting database data to XML documents 170
Loading database(s) from XML documents 172
Managing internationalization labels 174
Using the SQL processor 176
Exploring the entity reference tool 177
Viewing OFBiz usage statistics 181
Uncovering artifact information 183
Working with temporal expressions 186
Chapter 8: Web Services 189
Introduction 189
Requesting web services using URL parameters 190
Requesting web services using an HttpClient 193
Creating HttpClients and passing XML documents 196
Creating XML-RPC web service clients 199
Becoming an XML-RPC web service provider 202
OFBiz SOAP messaging clients 204
Generating a WSDL document 212
Creating SOAP-compliant web services 215
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