Data Controls Panel and UI Controls

The task of designing databound forms that coordinate with a back-end business service is accomplished declaratively with the Data Controls panel. The Data Controls panel affords the UI designer a hierarchical view of those business services that the application developer has registered with an instance of an Oracle ADF data control.

In the example, the name of the data control you will be using is AppModuleDataControl. The data control captures the master-detail relationships exposed by business service collections, and the Data Controls panel displays those relationships as parent and child nodes in the hierarchy. To view the available detail collections, expand a parent node in the hierarchy. In the example, OrdersView1 is the master collection; OrderItemsView2 that is under OrdersView1 is the detail collection. Under a collection, you will see the available attributes of the collection as child nodes.

With the aid of the Data Controls panel, UI design is a series of drag-and-drop steps. The list of available UI controls you can drop appears in a context menu when you drag and drop the data object selected from the Data Controls panel onto the form in the visual editor. Only the UI controls that are appropriate to display the chosen data object (collection or attribute) will appear in the context menu. For example, if you drag an attribute of a collection from the Data Controls panel, the selection menu filters the choices so all attribute-level controls (such as text fields and labels) appear in the list.

If you drag a collection from the Data Controls panel, your UI choices would not include a text field, but would include choices such as tables and navigation bars.

In the example, you will drag the collection OrdersView1 and drop it as an Edit Form on the client form:

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