The new version of Oracle Visual Builder Studio is now available on your instance. This version introduces several enhancements to both the visual application development experience and the overall DevOps platform. In this blog we introduce some of the key features we added.
Note that we are not updating the development environment in the standalone and OIC versions of Visual Builder in this cycle, they are planned to get these features in the next quarterly update. You are of course encouraged to leverage the design time in Visual Builder Studio and connet to these VB runtimes instance to get these features and many others.
Here are our top new features for this release:
Smart Delete
The delete operation in the development environment has been enhanced to help prevent errors and keep your code cleaner. When you try and delete an artifact that other application components depend on, we'll prompt you letting you before actually deleting it. You can use the usage information we provide about the artifact in the properties pane to figure out where it is being used.
In addition if you delete a component that refer to other artifacts – we'll offer to also remove the other artifacts – preventing unused artifacts such as variables, action chains, etc from being left behind.
Fragment Enhancements
Write back parameters – Pages that contain fragments can pass data to them through input variables that the fragment defines. Now changes in the values of these fragment variables can pass back to the containing page if that variable is marked as "write back to container". This reduces the need to raise custom events in the fragment to notify about changes done to variables.
Create page with fragment – When you create a new page in VB and your app contains fragments, VB will prompt you at page creation time to offer to include a fragment in your page, listing the available fragments.
Create fragment shortcut – The components palette not only shows you the available fragments, it now also has a shortcut for creating a new fragment.
Git Enhancements
The Git tab now shows a count of the number of files that have changed. In addition when you are using the diff functionality to compare files, it will automatically update as files are changed.
Editor Enhancements
When the visual editor first renders a page, you'll be able to see where time is being spent. This can help you tune your page. For example if you notice that the page takes time due to long REST calls, you might decide to defer them or parallalize them.
For cases where you have many tabs opened in the editor, VB will now keep the tab you are currently woring on visible automatically. An easier navigation between hidden/overflow tabs is also available.
When working in the code editor view, you can now right click to choose to insert component before, after, or inside the component you are currently on.
Business Objects
When mapping a business object to an existing table in the database, you can switch date fields to be defined either as dateTime or just date.
Team Management
File Ownership
You can now specify owners to directories and files in your Git repositories. You can then refer to code owner roles in merge requests and branch privacy settings to help enforce review by the code owners.
Switch Workspace's Environments
You are now able to switch a workspace from one environment to the other, letting you continue develop the application even if the environment is down, or preview/deploy your workspace on other environments.
There's More
There are more new features included in this release, from the ability to re-target merge requests in your Git repo, to control over how tab key behaves in the code editor. We recommend you'll review the complete list of new features in our documentation – where you'll also find links to deeper information on each feature.