12.1 Introduction to Displaying Data on a Page

The ADF data controls provide an abstraction of an application's business services, giving the ADF binding layer access to the service data. An application module data control represents a specific application module and exposes instances of that application module's view objects. Each application module is automatically available as a data control. You can bind UI components to application module data controls to populate a page with data from your active data model at runtime. For more information about application module data controls, see Chapter 10, "Overview of Application Module Data Binding".

The JDeveloper Data Control Palette exposes an application's data controls in the IDE and enables you to use drag and drop to create a variety of UI components on a JSF page. The UI components created by the Data Control Palette use declarative data binding, which means that the data binding expressions are automatically configured and that, in most cases, you do not have to write any additional code.

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 data binding EL expression

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