ADF Business Components

ADF Business Components are those which simplifies the application development process. For example if we consider Java application development, there we need to write code for things like database connections, retrieving data, handling some transactions.These are the things with which developer interacts rapidly in the application development process. But in ADF this entire process can be done in simple & declarative way using ADF Business Components.These ADF Business Components are reusable and saves the time of an developer.

The components which come under ADF Business Components are:-

1.Entity Object
2.View Object
3.Associations and View Links
4.Application Module
5.Business Component Tester

Let us see each component in detail.

Entity Object(EO):-  

        EO directly maps to the underlying database table. In simple terms it represents a database table. If we want to do any DML operations , we have to do it on entity object level since it directly connects to the database objects like tables, views, etc...

View Object(VO):-

         VO represents application specific view of data. In simple terms it represents an SQL query. In this process we can do join, filter, sort, etc.. on the SQL query to retrieve data according to the application requirement.

Note:- EO maps directly to the database objects where as VO is obtained by shaping a EO. When end user modified some data in the UI, then the respective VO interacts with the EO on it was based and validates the data and saves data if it is valid.

Associations and View Links:-

           An Association represents link or relationship between Entity objects, where as ViewLink represents link or relationship between View objects.
To understand better, consider database point of view. Here Association represents a Primary key or Foreign key relationship between tables, where as Viewlink represents a join condition in a query.

Application Module:-
       Application module is a registry of View objects and Viewlinks and it serves as a data controller  for the application and it creates and manages the database transactions.

Business Component Tester:-
     After creating the data model for UI, some times we wants to check before running on the server.
It can be achieved by using Business Component Tester. It is a First line of defense to see if data is exposed as per the requirement  and tests it.