5.1 Introduction to Displaying Data on a Page Using ADF

The ADF data controls, which are described in Section 3.10, "Exposing Services with ADF Data Controls", provide an abstraction of an application's business services, giving the ADF binding layer access to the service data. Data controls define the data model returned by the business service.

When designing user interfaces, you can bind page components to data through the ADF data controls, without having to write any additional code. The advantages of binding to ADF data controls, instead of binding to the JavaServer Faces standard managed beans, include:

• Declarative data binding using drag and drop from the Data Control Palette that requires little to no additional coding.

• A uniform (standards-based) approach to UI data binding for multiple UI technologies

The JDeveloper Data Control Palette exposes an application's data controls in the IDE and enables you to use drag and drop to create UI components that use declarative data binding.

Read this chapter to understand:

• How to use the Data Control Palette to create databound UI components

• The items that appear on the Data Control Palette

• The objects that JDeveloper creates for you when you use the Data Control Palette

• How to construct an ADF databinding EL expression

• The content of the page definition file and its relationship to EL expressions