Creating and Using LOVs (List of Values) in ADF Rich Client applications.

This is likely old hat to many of you but I dealt with a misconception on the forums that made me dig back into LOV creation and make sure that I had all my facts straight. As a result, I decided to just make a quick viewlet demonstrating how to create a LOV (List of Values) using ADF and the advantages to doing it ahead of time so that the framework recognizes it while doing its default binding activities. Check it out below:

So as you can see, they can be really helpful when you're dealing with pesky numerically based foreign keys in your data model. As I pointed out in the demo, it's also helpful if you can foresee the need for them ahead of time so you can create them on the relevant view objects before you drop them on the first page their needed on. That way the binding framework can automatically create the control as a LOV-based control instead of the standard input text forcing you to go back and change them once you get around to creating the LOV.

Of course you could do this manually without creating the LOV in the view object as well by dropping the attribute in question from the data control directly as an af:selectonechoice and completing the required information in the wizard similarly to what we did in the video.

Like I said at the end of the video, I'm going to also put together a viewlet showing how to use this same view object to demonstrate the usage of the ADF Search Form to speed the creation of search pages. Look for that in the next few days.