ADF Business Components Design Time Improvements for 10.1.2

The JDeveloper 10g 10.1.2 maintenance release is primarily a bug fix and performance improvement release, but we've made a few minor usability improvements to the ADF design time based on user feedback as well. This note highlights these changes for users of ADF Business Components in JDeveloper 10g version 9.0.5 and previous.

Create View Object Wizard

On the first page of the Create View Object Wizard, using a new radio group, you now can indicate what kind of data you need your new view object to manage.

If you select Updateable Access through Entity Objects, then the rest of the wizard behaves as it has in previous releases. If instead you select Read-only Access, then your next step is straight to the Query panel where you can enter your query. If you select Rows Populated Programmatically, not Based on a Query, then your next step in the wizard is the Attributes panel where you can define your transient attributes.

View Object Editor Tuning Panel

We've changed the wording of the View Object Editor's Tuning panel to improve usability. In the new Retrieve from Database group of controls, we let you choose between fetching all rows, at most one row for situations when you are querying by a unique identifier, or no rows when you want to use the view object only for inserting new rows. When querying all rows, the default is to fetch the rows as needed and in batches of 1 row at a time. By changing the size of the batch, you can retrieve more rows in each round trip to the database.

We've also tried to make the other options in the panel more clear, by adding more descriptive text to the options about filling the last page of rows when paging, and about passivating state.

Create Read-Only View Objects in Business Components from Tables Wizard

One of the best-practices that we recommend for optimizing performance is to understand when view objects based on entity objects are adding value and when they aren't. Read-only view objects based on custom SQL statements, without related entity object usages, are often just what you want for purely read-only data that doesn' t need to reflect pending edits in the current transaction.

We've enhanced the Business Components from Tables wizard in 10.1.2 to allow the creation of both Updateable and Read-Only View Objects. Other than the more specific wizard page title of Updateable View Objects from Entity Objects, creating updateable view objects from the wizard works as it did before...

What's new is the following Read-Only View Objects from Tables panel that appears after the Updateable View Objects from Entity Objects panel, and before the Application Module panel in the wizard. On this panel, you can pick any number of tables and have default, read-only, expert-mode SQL view objects created based on a SELECT ALL,...,COLUMNS FROM TABLENAME query.

Expert Mode Query Panel

When working with Expert-Mode queries, we now use the order of the columns in the SELECT statement to drive the order of the non-transient view object attributes that are populated by that SQL statement. So, for example if you started with an expert-mode, non-entity-related view object with a query like this...

and you decided that you'd prefer the id to come first, then the compensation, then the name, you could edit the query to look like this...

and when you click (Apply) or (OK), the Attributes list is automatically reordered to match the order of the SELECT list columns.

We also try to make sure that for an expert-mode query you cannot inadvertently re-order the attributes to be out of synch with the order that they appear in the SELECT list. We allow you to reorder the position of transient attributes — whose values don't depend on the SELECT list columns of your query — but we do not allow you to perform any attribute reordering that would result in a change of the relative ordering of the non-transient attributes that must correspond to the order of their matching columns in your expert-mode SELECT statement. You can see in the example below that the Up/Down arrows are disabled when I click on the Deptno view attribute.