Monitoring PPR Request Time on ADF UI Client Side

We can measure how long it takes to process request on the server side, however it is equally important to measure how long PPR request takes on the client side. Mainly because this will be a key factor for application performance exposed to the end user. There is relatively easy approach in JSF 2.0 to measure PPR request time on client side - with a special ajax tag. ADF 11g R2 and ADF 12c are based on JSF 2.0, this means we can use such tag and measure request performance. Read in my previous post how to monitor page load time in ADF UI client - Monitoring Page Load Time on ADF UI Client Side.

Here is the example of ajax tag. It provides special property called onevent, this property points to custom JavaScript method, which will be invoked by the framework when PPR request starts and ends:

Ajax tag can be used for various ADF UI components, initiating request. Below you can see example of ADF Faces button configured with onevent monitoring, it points to custom JavaScript monitor method:

JavaScript monitor method is invoked automatically, when request starts and succeeds. This means we can get start and end time, calculate total time taken to process PPR request from click to rendered response:

I would like to emphasise importance of this approach, based on example of ADF TF opening. Task Flow is a server side concept, on runtime its all is converted to HTML and rendered in the browser. When user clicks on the button, to render ADF TF content, he waits until it is initialised on the server side, business logic is executed and finally response is rendered. My example contains Method Call activity with delay code intentionally, to demonstrate how PPR request time measurement works:

ExecuteDelay method call invokes Java method, where thread is paused for 5 seconds:

Let's see how it works on runtime. Home page contains a list of employees, there is team hierarchy link available for each employee. On user click, it loads ADF TF with Hierarchy viewer (ADF TF explained above, with thread delay):

PPR request time starts when user clicks on the link and ends when ADF TF UI fragment content is rendered. This gets close to 6 seconds (there is added 5 seconds delay time from TF method call). We can measure, how long it really takes to see the content for the user, starting from the first click:

As soon as PPR request is completed, Hierarchy viewer component renders team structure:

Navigation back to the list is measured as well, it takes below 1 second:

PPR requests time for Save/Cancel/Back buttons in edit screen is measured in the same way:

Download sample application with implementation of described approach - ADFAltaApp_v3.zip.