Oracle Cloud What’s New in Oracle Visual Builder Studio, 23.04

DevOps
Docker Deployment VM management
An administrator can now view disk usage for Docker VMs and free up disk space by removing images and containers that are no longer needed. See Manage Docker VM Resources.

An administrator can also assign projects to a Docker deployment VM when creating a Docker deployment VM. See Add Your First Docker Deployment VM and Add Docker Deployment VMs.

Environment enhancements

• Health indicators

  The Environments page has a new column that displays the response time. Timeouts as
  well as indicators for the health of the connection are
  also shown. See Define
  Your Environments and Manage an
  Environment.

• All infrastructure services

  The Infrastructure Services button in the Environment page’s Instances tab now displays all infrastructure services, including Oracle Integration, OIC Gen 2, JCS, and OCI resources such as Compute, Storage, and databases. See Set Up an Environment.

• Schema name

  A new Schema column in the Deployments tab under the Environments page displays the schemas used by a visual application’s business objects. See View a Deployed Visual Application.

NPM sorting
The NPM Browse page now supports sorting artifacts by name, size, and last updated date. Sorting by size and date makes it much easier to quickly identify larger and less frequently used artifacts. This can help you determine which artifacts to retain and which to discard. See Browse and Search Packages in Your Project’s NPM Registry.

Pipeline logs
SCM Poll logs for pipelines that have commit or polling trigger action items now enable users to track how pipelines were triggered and what jobs were run. See Examine Pipeline Logs with Commit or SCM Polling Trigger Action Items.

Identity/Access Control
Token-based authentication
Token-based authentication is now available at the VB Studio level, so the same personal access token can be used for Git, Maven, and NPM. Users can select and set the expiration date, specify which projects are protected, and select the permissions for each token. Token management is done from one place, under User Preferences. Set Up Token-Based Authentication.

Visual Applications
Custom actions
In addition to VB Studio’s palette of built-in actions, you can now define and implement your own actions. A custom action is implemented with JavaScript and uses metadata to define input and output parameters. Once defined, you use your custom action in action chains just the way you’d use a built-in action. See Custom Actions.

New Flow Diagram view
When working with flows in the Diagram view, a new Flow Diagram now displays navigational relationships between pages in the flow. The Flow Diagram, different from the standard Diagram view, provides an interactive view that allows you to focus on navigation between pages in the flow, something quite useful when working with complex apps that contain many pages. This view See View a Flow’s Navigation in Diagram View.

You can also use this view to create pages and actions chains when you want to build workflows from scratch, just by dragging pages and actions from the Components palette and dropping them into the diagram. A subset of built-in actions (as well as custom actions) are available in the Components palette for you to use in your workflow. See Add Pages and Action Chains to a Flow in Diagram View.

Fragment enhancements

• Existing fragments in Components palette

  When adding an existing fragment to a page, you can now drag and drop the fragment directly from the Components palette onto the canvas, where previously you had to drop a fragment container before selecting the fragment. This way, a fragment container configured with the selected fragment is automatically created for you. As a part of this update, we’ve also changed the fragment’s Structure view, so you’ll see the fragment’s name, rather than a generic fragment container, for easier identification. See Create and Add a Fragment to a Page.

• Fragment metadata

  • To surface a fragment in the right context and filter it out where it isn’t suitable (for example, to tag a fragment as formTemplate and make it available only to users working with dynamic form templates). See

    Used For

    in Manage Fragment Settings.

  • To associate a fragment with icons that display anywhere the fragment is surfaced (for example, when the fragment appears in the Components palette in the Page Designer or the Layout editor). See

    Icon

    in Manage Fragment Settings.

  • To control how fragment parameters are to be used inside a fragment by providing the information that VB Studio requires to suitably generate metadata and expressions when the fragment is used in a component. This information can be specified in the Binding Type property that appears anytime a variable or constant parameter in a fragment is marked as enabled or required. See details about

    Binding Type

    in Pass Data Between a Page and Its Fragment.

  To provide a richer experience when using fragments, we’ve introduced metadata settings that enable a developer to better describe their fragments. As a fragment developer, you use this metadata:

Components palette enhancements

• Show Categories and Show Alphabetically options

  We’ve added two new options to give you more control over how components display in the Components palette. If you want to view a flat list of all components, you can choose to deselect the Show Categories option, enabled by default to show components in categories. If you keep the default, you can choose to view components in alphabetical order or a predefined order (as before). See The Components Palette.

• New category for existing fragments

  A new Fragments category in the Components palette now displays all existing fragments. To control which fragments show in the palette, you can change a fragment’s Used For metadata in the Settings editor. By default, all fragments use the pageContent tag and show in the Components palette. See Manage Fragment Settings.

Structure view enhancements

• Shading to highlight visible components in Structure view

  Sometimes, the Structure view might be overwhelmed with information, including components that are not visible on the page at the moment. We’ve now added shading to the Structure view to indicate which components on the page are currently visible; those not visible fade into the background to provide better context about what part of the page the Structure view represents.

  To further trim background information, you can select a new Show Visible Components Only option. This way, your view only displays nodes of components visible on the page.

• Show Empty Slots is now Show Slots

  The Show Slots option (previously Show Empty Slots) now displays the location of empty as well as occupied slots. You can also right-click a slot and use a new Insert Component option to drop a component directly into a slot.

See The Structure View.

Changed requirements for Apache Cordovo custom plug-in
As part of maintenance for the deprecated but still supported Cordova custom plug-in, we’ve updated the minimum version of Cordova and iOS required to build hybrid mobile apps. For details, refer to the readme.md file bundled with the Cordova Project Source file in the

Custom Plugins

tab of your mobile application’s

Settings

editor. See Add a Custom Plugin to Your Mobile Application.

Business object enhancements

• Database schemas used in different app phases

  You can now view the names of database schemas associated with a particular phase of an app’s lifecycle (Development, Shared, and Live). If you are using your own Oracle database, this information can help you access data using other tools for import or export, or access the tables for your own purposes. See View Database Schemas Used in an Application’s Lifecycle.

• App profiles to switch schemas for business objects based on existing DB tables and views

  When you use your own database schema, you can now associate application profiles with different phases of your application, to switch the schema that your app connects to during its lifecycle. For example, you might use a particular schema during the development phase, but switch to another one for testing or production. See Switch Schemas Used During an App’s Lifecycle.

• Schema validation for business objects based on existing DB tables and views

  For business objects based on existing DB tables and views, we’ve added validation to make sure a field’s metadata is compatible with the corresponding table/view column. If there’s a discrepancy, you’ll see validation messages around the UI component as well as in audits. See Create a Business Object Based on a DB Table or View.

Enhancements for Services and Backends

• Declarative support for Transforms

  Transforms can now be defined directly at the backend and server levels, allowing all endpoints coming from that server or backend to inherit that transform function. You can also override the transform at the endpoint level. With this update, Transforms has also moved from its own tab to an area in the Overview tab for backends, service connections, and some endpoints. See Add Transforms.

• Form-Data and Binary payload support for Service endpoint testing

  You can do much more with the Endpoints Test tab under Services. POST, PATCH, and PUT REST APIs with application/octet-stream and multipart/form-data formats can be tested from the Service Connection Test tab. In addition, you can download binary data or save textual data in the response body. If the response body doesn’t contain text, a message indicates that it contains binary data. See Test Service Connection Responses.

Dynamic Components
Dynamic form enhancements
You can now configure form field properties so that fields are displayed as multi-line text areas instead of the default single-line text field. You can set the number of rows of text area to display, and the max number of rows to which a text area can grow. See Set a Field to Display as a Text Area in a Form .

Application Extensions
Extensions versus classic application extensions
If you’ve ever created an

application extension

to customize the way an Oracle Cloud Application looks and behaves at runtime, you’ll notice some big changes in 22.07. For starters, many Oracle Cloud Applications have been re-architected as individual

App UIs

, which are independent units of pages and page flows based on the Redwood theme. You can still configure an Oracle-created App UI to meet your business needs, but the big news is that you can now use VB Studio to create your own App UIs, and deploy them right alongside Oracle apps in your Oracle Cloud Applications instance. In other words, you can now use the same tools that Oracle uses—namely, VB Studio and JET—to build robust applications that are managed as part of the same Oracle Cloud Applications ecosystem as the App UIs produced by Oracle.

If you don’t see App UI in the Designer’s navigator, you’re likely still working with an older version of an Oracle Cloud Application. In that case you should continue to refer to Using Visual Builder Studio with Classic Application Extensions. If you’re working in the new App UI world, however, Extending Oracle Cloud Applications with Visual Builder Studio contains everything you need to know. You may want to start with The Basics, just to get oriented.

Authentication for extensions
The

OAuth 2.0 User Assertion

authentication type cannot be used with extensions (this doesn’t apply to classic application extensions). You must select either

None

or

Oracle Cloud Account

for authentication. See Configure Authentication Types for Service Connections and Backends.

Support for fragments
Fragments are now supported in extensions (this doesn’t apply to classic application extensions):

• Create fragments in your extension, and add fragments from your extension’s dependencies to pages and components in your extension. See Add a Fragment From a Dependency.
• Extend fragments directly in your extension. You can now configure elements the fragment developer has made extendable, allowing you to override constants, access fragment events and actions, and components defined in fragments, such as Dynamic Containers in Fragments. You can also configure the fragments defined in dynamic components in your extension’s dependencies, so you can now Extend a Fragment in a Dynamic Container and Extend a Fragment in a Dynamic Form or Table.

Support for action chain tests
You can now run tests on action chains in extensions.