Reusability – and from there higher productivity and easier maintenance – is one of the key themes for ADF 11g. There are several important new concepts introduced in this new release, including Task Flows, Declarative Components, Page Templates and Page Fragments. It is of course one thing to create artefacts that are potentially reusable.  It is quite another to organize those artefacts and make them available across projects and applications. And that is where the ADF Library comes in. It is the vehicle for packaging up fairly small scoped reusable elements in JAR files that are then made available in the Resource Catalog.

It turns out to be incredibly easy to create an ADF Library – and to reuse one. I will demonstrate that in this article, by turning a Placeholder Data Control that provides off line data binding opportunities for applications using DEPT and EMP. I have created a Placeholder Data Control with Department and Employee Data Types and sample data taken from the SCOTT schema. (see Some more details on ADF Placeholder Data Control (rebind component, master detail, load sample data from CSV file)  for details on how to do that). Now I want to make that Placeholder More >