Help required building ADF-Swing/ADF-Faces using ADF Business Components

Question

My question is in regards to how you can go about building a light swing application to an ADF model?
In particular if I were to say that we were developing a 3-tier project whereby we had a database tier, a series of EJB-ADF façade session beans to the database (middle-tier), and a swing client communicating with the session beans (view-controller tier), how would you go about developing these screens?
In particular can we develop these screens using ADF-Faces and also ADF-Swing?
The EJB session façade beans of course are ADF app modules with customised methods. The methods would return back customised DTO objects. These DTO objects are wrappers to row objects ADF would create. This would be mainly due to making these facade beans web service enabled (Oracle state that these methods cannot return oracle.jbo objects if they are to be web service enabled).
This would be typically deployed to an app server, like Oracle App Server 10G.
Could you please have a look at this, as I am doing a lot of research into this.
eg. Taking example from oracle magazine sept/oct 2006
with slight enhancements
package oramag.frameworks.example.common;
import oracle.jbo.ApplicationModule;
import oramag.frameworks.customdto.EmployeeDTO;
public interface HRService extends ApplicationModule {
void deleteCurrentEmpAndCommit();
EmployeeDTO findEmployee(int employeeId); // new method
import oramag.frameworks.customdto.EmployeeDTO;
public class HRServiceImpl extends ApplicationModuleImpl {
public void deleteCurrentEmpAndCommit() {
Row empRow = getEmpView().getCurrentRow();
if (empRow != null) {
empRow.remove();
getDBTransaction().commit();
public EmployeeDTO findEmployee(int employeeId)() {
EmployeeDTO employeeDTO = null;
EmployeesImpl employees = getEmployees();
employees.setNamedWhereClauseParam("EmployeeId", employeeId);
employees.executeQuery();
if(employees.hasNext()) {
EmployeesRowImpl employee = (EmployeesRowImpl)employees.next();
employeeDTO = new EmployeeDTO(employee);
return employeeDTO;
public EmployeesImpl getEmployees() {
return (EmployeesImpl)findViewObject("Employees");
Now given the above code snippet, how could you turn this into an ADF-Swing/ADF Faces application so that if a user using the swing application enters an employee id, then the application will execute the query on the app server, the app server in turn returns the results to the client, and the client finally display the results. Typical MVC example.
Cheers
Rodney

Answer 1

The tutorial is for ADF BC used with JavaServer Faces.
While the tutorial doesn't cover it, we also support drag and drop development for Swing and visual WYSIWYG layout for Swing panels and windows, too. For a very simple example, watch screencast #4 on my blog here:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0118231/stories/2005/06/24/jdeveloperAdfScreencasts.html
One thing I have noticed is that when using ADF business components, when the app module returns a custom DTO object like the above example, it returns the data in a element structure according to the data control palette.
You don't generally ever need to create your own custom DTO's when working with ADF for use by client UI's. The only situation where can be necessary -- until we simplify this in the JDeveloper/ADF 11g release -- is when you desire to expose custom methods that can return sets/arrays of typed row structures through a web service. However, web services are not involved/required in building 3-tier Swing applications.
When dropping onto a page it does so like a string and doesnt give option to display the data in a read only form etc. Is there anything we need to do, to get the functionality.
It's more of what you don't need to do :-)
Just leverage the active data model that the ADF application module provides. You can read more about it in section 4.5 "Understanding the Active Data Model" of the ADF Developer's Guide for Forms/4GL Developers on the ADF Learning Center at http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/adf/learnadf.html). Your UI's bind to view object instances in the data model, and your UI's are automatically kept up to date without needing to write methods that return data. I short article I wrote that preceeded my writing the ADF Developer Guide content on this topis is here:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0118231/stories/2006/01/26/theAdfBusinessComponentsActiveDataModel.html
I know that when dropping a view object you get this functionality. Also was wondering if we were to pass an object of thios type back to the model it might not give us the rich functionality like input forms, like what Oracle provides if we were to drop a enitity view object.
Just use the active data model and everything becomes totally easy, with no changes required to switch between local or three-tier deployment configurations.
Trying to do everything with hand-coded DTO beans is really going the hard way.
Could you help us regarding this?