5.1 Introduction to Displaying Data on a Page

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. You can bind UI components to data controls to populate a page with data from your data model at runtime.

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.

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

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