An engineering tag register provides a centralised data repository for the smallest unit of deliverable in a large scale engineering project. Each engineering tag follows a set of rules defining it's class and naming convention. The class of tag defines the type of attributes that should be recorded about that tag.

Engineers collaborate throughout the lifetime of the tag, from schematic design through to 3D placement, testing and construction. During the whole process the evolution of the tag is updated in the tag register.

It is therefore important that the register is accessible by a great number of users concurrently, which is why sound database and UI technology must be selected. In this project, Oracle's BC4J and ADF frameworks were used.

The data layer is provided by reverse-engineering the existing Oracle schema objects into business components using BC4J. Oracle JDeveloper provides a very useful round-trip diagram facility. The entity diagram of the schema is shown below.

Basic CRUD operations on the data objects are possible from the ADF pages thanks to the full data binding support.

ADF pages can be data bound directly to the data objects in the BC4J project.

The screen shots below show the select and edit screens for a single entity.

The navigation in ADF is built upon Struts to provide MVC level 2 behaviour. All the navigation in a struts project is stored in a struts-config.xml file. Once again JDeveloper provides a convenient diagrammatic view to edit this information. The screen shot below shows the navigation for this application.