Business Components for Java & XML

Question

In the application I am currently developing, I am using XML metadata to communicate between a web browser and servlets (the xml is parsed by a servlet using an XSL stylesheet to output plain html). To build the XML, I am using the XML SQL utility and the following code:
try{
dset = new OracleXMLDataSetExtJdbc(conn, (Reader)sqlStr);
dset.refreshDataSet();
}catch (Exception ex){}
OracleXMLDocGen doc = (OracleXMLDocGen) new OracleXMLDocGenString();
OracleXMLQuery qry = new OracleXMLQuery(dset);
qry.setRaiseException(true);
qry.getXML(doc, qry.DTD);
My question involves Oracle's Business components for Java. We have recently been doing more research into this technology and the features of it are quite appealing. However, as far as I can tell, there is no way to use the Oracle XML Utilities in conjunction with the BC4J. ie. XML is created based on a view object, not a SQL query to the Database.
Does anyone know of any way of acheiving this XML generation based on a BC4J foundation?

Answer 1

A BC4J View Object is effectively a Java component that represents a database query.
The key difference is that the view object exposes a rowset API to work with which is
fully updateable, fully scrollable, and automatically coordinated with underlying business logic which you have encapsulated into your companion entity objects (another BC4J Framework building-block component). View objects can also be used to create any interesting hierarchy of master/detail/detail queried database information using "View Links" to link the View Objects together. This allows you to effectively work with a "tree" of data that is perfectly shaped and filtered to the needs of the task at hand -- including self-referential "parts-explosion" kind of view links.
In JDeveloper 3.1, BC4J ships with a utility class called oracle.jbo.xml.XmlRowSetRenderer which automatically supports rendering the results
of any view object (and its "tree" of view-linked view objects) as XML, either in DOM format or into a Writer.
In JDeveloper 3.2 (the next major release) the B2B XML features of the BC4J framework are further enhanced by supporting true, bidirectional XML-in and XML-out for any view object. This means that an XML message can be "fed" to any view object and it natively knows how to handle inserts, update, deletes and (most importantly) enforcement off all shared business logic from the underlying, related entity objects.