1. Managing Metadata Repositories for Oracle Analytics Server
  2. Build Your Metadata Repository
  3. Work with ADF Data Sources
  4. What Are ADF Business Components?

What Are ADF Business Components?

Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) is an object-relational framework used to create J2EE business services and expose underlying database objects.

This framework provides an abstraction layer that enables application developers to build applications quickly and efficiently.

When you use Oracle ADF to build service-oriented Java EE applications, you implement your core business logic as one or more business services. These back-end services provide clients with a way to query, insert, update, and delete business data as required, while enforcing appropriate business rules. ADF Business Components are prebuilt application objects that provide a ready-to-use implementation of Java EE design patterns and best practices.

The ADF model is represented through the ADF Business Component constructs called Entity Objects and View Objects, usually constructed and defined during design time:

  • Entity Objects

    Entity objects are ADF framework components that represent a row in a database table and simplify modifying its data. Entity object enable encapsulating domain business logic for those rows to ensure your business policies and rules are consistently validated.

  • View Objects

    View objects are ADF framework components that encapsulate a SQL query and simplify working with its results. In addition to read-only view objects, there are entity-based view objects that support updatable rows. The view object queries just the data needed for the client-facing task at hand, then cooperates with one or more entity objects in your business domain layer to automatically validate and save changes made to its view rows. An entity-based view object encapsulates a SQL query. You can link an entity object into master/detail hierarchies using view links. You can use entity objects in the data model of your application modules.

    Applications built using ADF obtain their data by querying the defined View Objects using the ADF APIs.

The ADF model also includes an application module, which is the transactional component that UI clients use to work with application data. It defines an updatable data model along with top-level procedures and functions, called service methods, related to a logical unit of work related to an end-user task.

The application module serves as a container for multiple View Objects and Entity Objects, and also contains configuration related to the JDBC data source.

About Operational Reporting with ADF Business Components

You can use integrated ADF Business Components to generate reports on data within your applications.

For example, you can generate reports based on expense data entered into an expense application. You would import the expense application metadata into the Oracle BI Repository using the Model Administration Tool, map the data from the Physical layer to the Business Model and Mapping layer, and then map the data to the Presentation layer. After you restart the Oracle BI Server and reload the metadata into Oracle BI Presentation Services, you can log in to Answers and drag and drop the columns to generate a report using the expense application data. You could select columns to view a report of your expenses grouped by a specific category such as airline travel expenses.