ADF BC - Refresh VO reference entity

Question

Hello,
I have a view object with an updateable entity and a reference entity. I want to enter the 1st entity attributes (including foreign key) and have reference entity attributes populated automatically after some button click. I don't want to issue commit.
What should the button action look like? Will the view object currentRow.refresh(...) do the job?

Answer 1

It definitely doesn't have to be this complicated.
Simply write a method on your application module that does everything you want inside that method. Then, invoke that method from the view/controller layer.
Due to the ADF BC active data model, the page will automatically update to show the refreshed foreign key information -- though you may need to correctly setup your Partial Page Rendering "Partial Triggers" properties to get the UI to repaint the updated values.
Let me know if you still have questions.
If you do still want to do it from the view/controller layer in your backing bean, you have to set the value of the binding, you could use a helper class like this:
package demo.view.util;
import javax.faces.context.FacesContext;
import javax.faces.el.ValueBinding;
public class EL {
   public static boolean test(String booleanExpr) {
     return Boolean.TRUE.equals(get(booleanExpr));
  public static String getAsString(String expr) {
    return (String)get(expr);
  public static Object get(String expr) {
    FacesContext fc = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance();
    ValueBinding vb = fc.getApplication().createValueBinding(expr);
    return vb.getValue(fc);
  public static void set(String expr, Object value) {
    FacesContext fc = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance();
    ValueBinding vb = fc.getApplication().createValueBinding(expr);
    vb.setValue(fc,value);   
}Then from your backing bean, assuming your attribute binding for the primary key attribute is named "MyPKAttr", you could write:
  EL.set("#{bindings.MyPKAttr}", newValue);However, I repeat, if you are writing code that invokes an application module method to get a result, and then you pass that result back to another application module method, this is a signal that you should just encapsulate all of those details inside the service itself instead of having to do it in multiple steps.
See Chapter 8 in the ADF Developer's Guide for Forms/4GL Developers for a number of tips about creating custom methods in your application module.