About Oracle ADF Data Controls for EJB Components

If you use EJB technology as your business service technology, model information will be exposed to the view and controller layers through Oracle ADF data control interfaces implemented by thin, Oracle-provided adapter classes, as shown in the following figure.

Data Control Palette shows EJB

1 The data control

This node represents the data control, in this case a session facade. Drag a stateless session bean from the Navigator and drop it onto the Data Control Palette to create the data control or to refresh its contents.

2 Row sets

These nodes represent collections:

AllDepartments is a collection of the Departments DTO.
employees_departmentIdDTO is a collection within AllDepartments, equivalent to a master-detail relationship.

3 Attributes

These nodes represent individual attributes.

4 Standard operations

These nodes represent standard collection operations. The session facade has similar nodes that represent transaction-level operations. The operations available for a collection include Previous Set and Next Set, which scroll through the data based on range size.

5 Special navigation operations

These nodes allow you to set the row set's current row to a particular displayed row.

6 Custom method

Custom service methods will appear on the Data Control Palette.

About the Generated Files

There are four files that are generated when you create a data control from a session bean, two Java files and two XML files. The JDeveloper design time creates the following XML files automatically to facilitate such things as resolving accessor types in the Property Inspector.

SessionEJB.xml is a generated XML document that represents all JavaBeans surfaced through the ADF data controls, other than built-in classes like java.lang.String. The create() method exposed through the session EJB data control returns a session EJB instance. This is the XML file to represent that Java type.
SessionEJBDataControl.java is a generated Java class that provides a JavaBeans wrapper to expose the stateless session bean&rsquos remote (or local, if no remote interface is exposed) methods, delegating the method requests to a lazily-created session bean instancee.
SessionEJBDataControl.xml is an XML document that may be edited through the Property Inspector, typically to assign member type information for collection or list methods exposed through the session bean&rsquos component interface.
SessionEJBDataControlBeanInfo.java is the BeanInfo class for SessionEJBDataControl.java. The BeanInfo class serves to filter out noncomponent interface methods.