Entity Level View Accessors

In one of my previous posts I explained what happens behind the scene while working with View Accessors. Usually we define view accessors in the same view object definition where we define lists of values. However, it is also possible to define view accessors at the entity definition level. In that case we can use an entity level view accessor when defining lists of values in the entity based view objects. This is a pretty convenient feature in terms of reusing. So, a proper view accessor  can be defined only once at the entity definition level and it’s going to be available for reusing in all view objects that are based on this entity definition.
But besides convenience, this feature can also be useful in terms of performance. For each view accessor definition the framework at runtime creates an internal lookup VO instance according to the view definition linked to the view accessor. This is shown on the following diagram.

There are two VO definitions on the diagram - VO1 and VO2. Both of them are based on the same entity definition. There are three view accessors on the diagram. Two of them are defined at the view object definition level and the rest one is defined at the entity definition level. All view accessors point to the same lookup view object definition. The framework at runtime is going to create three internal view object instances. One instance per view accessor definition. Note, that lists of values that are based on the entity level view accessor will share the same lookup view object instance, which means they are going to reuse the same query results and share the same query collection cache.
So, view accessors, defined at the entity level can be considered by ADF developers as a promising technique.


That's it!