Pretty URL in ADF Faces of JDeveloper 11.1.2.2
- by Frank Nimphius
Many features planned for Oracle JDeveloper 12c find their way into current releases of Oracle JDeveloper 11g R1 and JDeveloper 11g R2. One example of such a feature is "pretty URL" - or "clean URL" as the Oracle JDeveloper 11g R2 (11.1.2.2) documentation puts it.
"A.2.3.24 Clean URLs
Historically, ADF Faces has used URL parameters to hold information, such as window IDs and state. However, URL parameters can prevent search engines from recognizing when URLs are actually the same, and therefore interfere with analytics. URL parameters can also interfere with bookmarking. By default, ADF Faces removes URL parameters using the HTML5 History Management API. If that API is unavailable, then session cookies are used.You can also manually configure how URL parameters are removed using the context parameter oracle.adf.view.rich.prettyURL.OPTIONS. Set the parameter to off so that no parameters are removed. Set the parameter to useHistoryApi to only use the HTML5 History Management API. If a browser does not support this API, then no parameters will be removed. Set the parameter to useCookies to use session cookies to remove parameters. If the browser does not support cookies, then no parameters will be removed."
See: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26098_01/web.1112/e16181/ap_config.htm#ADFUI12856
So basically, what this part in the documentation says is:
In JDeveloper 11g R2 (11.1.2.2), Oracle ADF Faces automatically removes its internally used dynamic parameters from the URL
You can influence the setting with the prettyURL.OPTIONS context option, which however is not recommended you to do because the default behavior is able to detect if the browser client supports HTML 5 History management or not. In the latter case it the uses a session cookie and if this doesn't work, falls back to the "old" URL parameter adding.
The information that is not so explicit and clearly mentioned in the documentation is that this is only for ADF Faces parameters (such as _afrLoop, Adf-Window-Id, etc.), but not the ADF controller token (_adf.ctrl-state)! Removing the ADF controller token is an enhancement request that will be implemented in Oracle JDeveloper 12c