Home page in a JHeadstart application

This week I finished a JHeadstart generated application. Indeed I found that using JHeadstart, espessially because of the Velocity Templating framework, you get about the same productivity of Oracle Designer.

When you generate an application using JHeadstart, it generates also a Home.jspx for you. If you use this Home.jspx as your landing page (because after logging in by default you "land" on this page) you find that it lacks a menu. And maybe you want some other elements on this page. Of course you can edit the generated Home.jspx, adding the menu-facet and the other elements. But I found that sometimes JHeadstart regenerates the Home page.
If you use Subversion (or another version control system) and had committed your Homepage then you can reset your Home page back from your repository. But certainly I forget this 3 out of 4 times.

So I thought: lets generate the home page together with the other screens.

To do that you have to create another group in the application service with the JHeadstart Application Definition Editor. Call it the Home group.
Uncheck the 'Bound to Model Data collection'. Of course you do not have to choose a Data Collection.

As a layout style choose: Form.
Set the search settings both on false.
As tab-name I would choose "Home".
For a display title you can choose: "Welcome #{jhsUser!=null ? jhsUser.displayName : facesContext.externalContext.userPrincipal.name} to the Service Oriented Scheduler Maintenance Application!". In fact I copied this from the original generated home page. Of course I gave onather application name (it used to be "JHeadstart demo application").

Under Operations uncheck every DML operation.

Since there is already a "Home" button in the Global Menu, I do not want to have the Home page in the application menu. So I unchecked "Add Menu entry for this Group" under Customization Settings.

For a Group it is mandatory to have a Descriptor Item. But I did not want any items on my page. So what I did was to create one item, called "Home" (or what ever you like).


Uncheck "Bound to Model attribute?".
As a Java Type, I choose "String" (but that does not do anything) and as a display type "Hidden". Furthermore I set the Display properties all on False, and unchecked the Search options. But since I had a hidden field, these options might do nothing. I did not check.

Now if I did not forget to mention anything, the home page is generated for you, as you like, with the proper menu. You can adapt it to your wishes by adding other elements as Items (like an image for instance).

And here is my Do It Yourself-Home-page: