Weblog for the AMIS Technology corner
Posts tagged data control
JDeveloper 11g PS 1 has been released – cool stuff!
Nov 14th
Last month during Oracle Open World I wrote an article on the upcoming features of PatchSet 1 for JDeveloper 11g: . Now this release has been published and is delivering on those promises. For an overview of all (?) new features, take a look at What's New. It is a fairly dry, emotionless, factual list of features small, large and enormous new features. With brief descriptions and screen shots for many of them, it gives you a quick overview of what might be useful to you. Note however that some gems are hidden away in this list for which the meaning and importance is not fully captured I believe in this summary. And of course the relevance of any new feature depends on your specific situation.
ADF 11g: Model driven display properties in Pojo based Data Controls
Oct 29th
ADF 11g allows us to specify display hints, validation rules and a lot of other declarative settings for Attributes in Pojo based DataControls. These specifications influence the way display items based on these attributes are displayed and how they behave. Note: most of the default display settings based on model based settings can be overridden in the application. Note that this does not apply to for example the Validation Rules.
In a previous post, I suggested that the ViewObject in ADF BC seems to be taking over the role as DataControl – suggesting that even in a Pojo based scenario (for example with WebService proxies) a ViewObject should be used as the ultimate linking pin to the View (see:The rise of the ViewObject – or: isn’t the ViewObject the real Data Control?). The functionality discussed in this article demonstrates that we can do more for Pojos than I realized when writing that article. However, POJOs are still not ViewObjects…
The rise of the ViewObject – or: isn’t the ViewObject the real Data Control?
Oct 15th
The ADF Model is positioned to decouple the Application from the implementation details of the Business Service(s) it uses. Any Business Service, be it an EJB, a POJO based JPA implementation, a WebService, a plain URL service (RESTful or otherwise), a Content Management API or an ADF Business Components Application Module, can be published as a Data Control through the ADF Model and from there be used in Data Bindings. The application deals with Data Bindings, the ADF Model layer interfaces with all different business service technologies. Sounds good. However: some business service technologies are more equal than others. Or to be more exact: one is more equal than others. ADF Business Components enjoys far more privileges in the ADF Model layer than the other persistence and implementation technologies do. Read the rest of this entry »
Publishing resources exposed by ADF Data Control in RESTful services using RestLet and JDeveloper 11g
Oct 14th
The previous two articles on RESTful services using RestLet and developing in JDeveloper 11g – First Steps with RestLet 1.1RC2 in JDeveloper 11g – restful services 101 and Extending the RestLet application with support for POST/PUT to create and update Resources – used a static data set as source for the Resources. For real world services that will not be your typical scenario. Usually a business service hiding a persistence layer sitting on top of a database or wrapping a web service (RESTful or otherwise) is the more logical publisher of resources.
In this article, we will see how we can leverage ADF Model – Data Control & Data Bindings – to hook up such a business service. ADF Model publishes a Data Control for each Business Service it exposes. Through the Data Control applications can get access to data collections and operations acting on that data. For the application consuming the Data Control there should be no difference whether the underlying business service is an ADF BC application module connecting to a relational database, an EJB doing something similar, a web service published in the SOA of the organization or a RESTful service out there on the internet. That is at least the theory.
In this article, I will create a very simple Data Control, really nothing more than a mock object: a Placeholder Data Control. I will create a Thing data type and expose through the Placeholder Data Control a collection of Thing objects. The benefit of this approach is that we can take look at how ADF model can be used for providing the foundation for our RESTful services without the need for implementing a real business service. In a subsequent article we should find that the code we now write for the placeholder data control will work for ‘real’ data controls as well. 
Read the rest of this entry »
Some more details on ADF Placeholder Data Control (rebind component, master detail, load sample data from CSV file)
Sep 21st
In a recent article I gave a brief introduction of the ADF 11g Placeholder Data Control – see: ADF 11g Placeholder Data Control – for off line demonstration of application and/or rapid UI prototyping without a need for a business service – and the value of using that type of Data Control for User Interface design/prototyping. I promised to take a closer look at same slightly more interesting aspects of this type of data control. How the data control can be created from a CSV file – both attributes and sample data-, how Placeholder Data Control Data Types can have a master details relationship and how an ADF Faces component, bound to a Placeholder Data Control can be rebound to another Data Control. Read the rest of this entry »
ADF 11g Placeholder Data Control – for off line demonstration of application and/or rapid UI prototyping without a need for a business service
Sep 21st
ADF applications are typically heavily into data. One of the major strengths of the framework is the data binding layer that allows rapid development of complex user interfaces bound to underlying data controls. These data controls expose data sources such as relational databases, web services, content management systems, JMX beans (as of 11g), REST/URL services and plain files. ADF applications in the recent past had to be developed with all these data sources present – without them the UI components could not be rendered and the application would not run.
This limits the flexibility during the development process: data sources are required for creating the databound user interface. Without them, no meaningful user interfacer can be created.
With 11g, a new type of data control is introduced: the Placeholder Data Control. Placeholder Data Controls are the stand-ins for real data controls. They can be used when the real data control and its underlying data source are not yet available or the application is temporarily off line without access to the database or web services that underpin the model. Placeholder Data Controls allow the creation of a data bound user interface in the absense of the data sources. They UI designers/web specialists to create a functional application with meaningful data and working navigation without knowledge of the business services.
Creation of a Placeholder Data Control and its Data Types is a simple task – and using them is even simpler: Read the rest of this entry »
