Creating the User Interface

Once you have built the model and persistence layer of your application, you will typically create a bean data control for each entity service class, so you can build your MAF AMX pages in a visual way using drag and drop from the data control palette in JDeveloper. This process of building the UI layer is the same regardless of whether you use AMPA or not. The difference is that AMPA provides you with a number of features that make you more productive in building and testing this user interface layer:

• For quick testing of your model layer and/or user prototyping you can use the AMPA MAF User Interface Generator which auto-generates a complete MAF feature including taskflow, amx pages and data bindings (page definitions).
• The entity service bean data control has a large number of methods that help you to quickly build user interface with CRUD functionality
• You can view pending data sync actions using a reusable data sync feature included with AMPA, or create your own pages using the data sync service data control.
• You can force the application to behave as if it is offline while it is actually connected to the internet
• You can add a visual indicator to show the user that works is being done in the background. You typically use this to inform the user that the app is reading or writing data from/to a remote server.
• With just a few lines of Java code, you can use the Oracle Mobile Cloud Service (MCS) platform API's to send (custom) analytics events, to read/write files to/from an MCS storage collection, and to (de-)register the device for receiving push notifications
• You can inspect the details of every REST call using a reusable web service calls feature included with AMPA

The next sections will explain these features in more detail.