The Goals for ADF Business Components

ADF Business Components (ADFbc) is the framework used in Oracle Fusion Applications for building database-centric business services. It provides a highly declarative way of developing Java objects on top of relational database tables. In addition to providing the core feature of the
Model layer, described earlier, it provides value-added features such as the ability to declare calculated attributes, lists of values, query by example, and predefined filter criteria.

So, if you want to build an application based on the Customers and Orders tables in the database, ADF Business Components allows you to rapidly build a business service based on that data model. It will automatically implement database constraints for any master/detail relationships, and provide methods for manipulating the data model such as commit, rollback, and delete.


There are a number of goals for a business services framework like ADF
Business Components. At the most fundamental level, a business service is required to query information from an underlying database and cache that data while various operations are performed on it. It then has to validate the data changes and complete the transaction by committing the data back to the database. This use case can be broken down into the following
high-level tasks:

• Defining application objects that map to database tables
• Managing data and business logic validation
• Creating application-specific views of the data
• Coordinating master/detail behavior of the business model based on foreign key relationships
• Providing default operations such as commit, delete, and update on the data model

ADF Business Components provides these core features within the framework in a generic way, allowing these generic services to be adapted for the application-specific case.

The core features and functionality of the ADF Business Components framework are implemented in Java. For the most part, the Java classes responsible for the previously noted features, and more, are hidden from the Fusion developer. Instead, the developer generates and maintains metadata
through property pages and declarative editors, and it is this metadata that drives the generic Java framework classes when the application runs.