Introduction

The ADF entity object hides the physical database objects from the developers, and enables them to work with data in the form of Java objects and properties—for example, departments and employees. If you take business logic built by using ADF Business Components, an entity object represents data source definition (for example, a database table) and an entity instance represents a row in the datasource. In this chapter, you will learn using entity objects to build a data model for your business application. This chapter mainly focuses on declarative features offered by the ADF entity object. More advanced features will be explained in Chapter 5, Advanced Concepts on Entity Objects and View Objects.

An entity object shields the developer from the complexities of the underlying datasource, using the concept of object relational mapping. The datasource for a typical ADF application could be traditional relational database management systems, such as Oracle, MySQL, MS SQL Server,...