ADF BC. Working with custom data control.

It is highly recommended to create our custom set of subclasses of the framework BC base classes and to build our BC model on the top of them. This gives us a certain flexibility and ability to control what's going on. But sometimes it would be cool to have our own extension at the middle layer, I mean the data control layer. A wide range of tricks can be done having a custom data control. I've already blogged about some and definitely will blog about many more. A lot of ADF developers are a bit scared of this technique and consider it as something from the dark side. But actually it's a very easy technique despite the power it gives to developers.

So, you have to make the following steps:

Create custom data control class:
It is recommended to use JUApplication as a base class for your custom data control:

public class AgileDataControl extends JUApplication
{
...

Override the desired methods:

  @Override
  protected void applySortCriteria(DCIteratorBinding iter,
                                   SortCriteria[] sortBy) {
     //Some job

    }

Create custom data control factory returning the class name of your custom data control:

public class AgileDataControlFactory extends DataControlFactoryImpl
{
  @Override
  protected String getDataControlClassName() {
          return AgileDataControl.class.getName();
      } 
}

Specify custom data control factory in the DataBindings.cpx file:

<BC4JDataControl id="AgileDataModelServiceDataControl"
                     Package="agiledatamodel"
                    FactoryClass="agiledatamodel.datacontrol.AgileDataControlFactory"
                     ...

Enjoy!
 
That's it!