Extend the ArcGIS ADF with POJOs - Part II

In Part I we discussed how you could implement GIS functionalities in POJOs and plug them into the ADF. In this part we'll extend the POJO a little further.

In Part I, the CountFeatures object calculated and updated the feature count on a client interaction such as a button click. Suppose that we now need for this object to recalculate the count automatically whenever the current extent of the map changes or the map refreshes due to some other action.

The ADF provides a very simple way to do this. Objects can register themselves as observers of the WebContext and whenever the context is refreshed (by virtue of the user calling the refresh() method on the context), all observers will be intimated of this event and each observer can act upon it individually. This way we have loosely coupled objects reacting together to the context refresh.

With this background let's now extend our CountFeatures class to implement this behavior.

public class CountFeatures implements WebContextInitialize, WebContextObserver {

  public void init(WebContext context) {
    ...
    context.addObserver(this);
  }

  public void update(WebContext context, Object arg) {
    doCount(); //perform the business action on update
  }
  ...
}

First up, all observers of the WebContext need to implement the WebContextObserver interface. Next, they register themselves as observers of the context by calling the addObserver() method on the context. Finally, on every context refresh, the update() method of the WebContextObserver interface is called by the ADF and the object reacts (performs the business action) to the same. In this case we simply call the doCount() method which recalculates the feature count of the updated map. This will ensure that whenever the context refreshes (for example when the user zooms or pans), this object will recalculate and display the new count to the user.

As simple as that. Apart from a few modifications to the Java code, nothing else needs to change from the Part I source code. The JSP as well as the configuration files remain unchanged. You can download all the source code (including the unchanged JSP) for this part from here.

In Part III we'll extend CountFeatures further by implementing the WebLifecycle interface.