30 Nov 2017

Creating a View Object Row with ADF Bindings CreateInsert action

In this short post I am going to highlight a small pitfall related to a very common approach to create a new record in a task flow.
Let's consider an example of a simple task flow creating a new VO row, displaying that row on a page fragment and committing the transaction if the user clicks "Ok" button:



The CreateInsert method call has been just dragged&dropped from the data control palette. The thing is that if the user does not update any VO attributes in view1 page fragment, the Commit method call will do nothing. The new row will not be posted to the database.
The reason for this behavior is that the ADF bindings CreateInsert action always creates an entity in Initialized state, which is ignored by the frameworks while committing the transaction. Even if the entity has default values, or it's Create method is overridden setting the attribute values, it doesn't matter, the entity will be still in Initialized state after the CreateInsert action. Afterwords, if any VO attributes are modified, the entity gets the New status and the framework will post changes (preform insert statement) while committing the transaction. This behavior is quite logical as in most cases task flows like that create a view object row to get it updated by the user before submitting to the database. However, most cases are not all and if it is needed we can always implement a custom VO method creating/inserting a new row and invoke it instead of the standard CreateInsert action. Like this one:

  public void addNewEmployee() {
    EmployeeViewRowImpl  row = (EmployeeViewRowImpl) createRow();
    insertRow(row);
  }


That's it!

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