I just finished creating an updated portlet for work. There were two changes that were needed, data from two different database instances and the format was changed to use <dt> and <dd> tags. This allows for a rolling scrollable format to be defined by a cascading style sheet.

I thought this would take a couple of hours, so estimated this at about four hours to complete. Now I’m finished, and it is six hours after starting. So what went wrong? The biggest mistake that I made was not really understanding what happens when the files are bundled up for deployment. When creating the two separate model projects, I used the same name for the package name. I was using different names for the model projects, so no problem, right? Wrong! When the files get packaged, the package names are used in a combined classes directory. Since I have two different bc4j.xcfg files defined, one of them gets clobbered and I get an obscure jbo oracle error.

If you are using multiple models in a project, just use a unique package name for each one, and things will go much better for you! Though, it might still take six hours instead of two…