The new release of Visual Builder Studio has hit the streets offering many new features, read this blog to learn about the key new features in this 2307 release. Join our monthly office hours webcast to catch some live demos of the new functionality. 

Visual Builder Features

JavaScript Action Chains

Defining business logic in a declarative way has been a key benefit of Visual Builder – helping developers deliver apps faster and reduce coding errors. Up until now these action chains have been implemented as a JSON file that including the meta-data about the actions, conditions, variables etc. Developers mostly worked with visual editor, and relied on the browser console logging to help debug issues.

The new version of VB now implements action chains directly in JavaScript code – while still providing a super-productive declarative way to define your logic. As before you can switch from the visual view to the code view of an action chain, but now you'll actually see JavaScript code, which you can easily modify and add to. Furthermore, when you run the application, you'll now be able to leverage browser developer tools to set breakpoints, inspect variables, and modify the code as you debug your application's logic.

Another benefit of the JavaScript based action chains is that they are easier to merge and manage when using Git operations – similar to any code based solution.

Track Variable Change Status

This features makes it simpler to track whether a user made changes in a page, for example if you need to notify the end user before they leave a page where there are un-saved changes. You can check the checkbox for track changes for variables in your page. New declarative actions return the status of the tracked variables, and reset the status back when you specify so.

Fragments Enhancements

We are continuing to enhance the functionality of fragments giving you more capabilities to accelerate development using reusable page fragments. In this release you'll notice the following enhancements:

• Auto-wiring of variables – variables used in a fragment can be marked to be automatically wired when used in a page – this will then automate the creation of these variables in pages that use the specific fragment – making it easier to bind values to them.
• Customize parameter display – you can customize the component that will be used to show for each fragment parameter including which type of component and the label of the parameter. Furthermore you can break down the display of fragment parameters into sections using a new design time tab to control how parameters are displayed for consumers. These enhancements streamline consumption of fragments and make it easier to provide the right type of values for the parameters.
• Input parameters mapping to constants – you can now map fragments input parameters to constants defined in the containing page using them as the value for the input variable.

Audit Results Display

Visual Builder audits your code as you develop your application and will warn you about issues in your code. This includes rules that check for unused variables, missing mandatory attributes, and much more. We updated the audit results tab to use an expandable tree view, which makes it easier to see the issues related to a specific page in your application.

DevOps Features

Approval Step in CI/CD Pipelines

You can now add an approval step to a CI/CD pipeline – this will pause the pipeline's progress until an approval is received from specific people. You can define groups of approvers and associate them with specific pipelines. When an approval step is reached, an email is sent to the approvers, and they can then use the visual interface of the pipeline to approve that it is ok for the pipeline to proceed, or they can choose to not approve and stop the pipeline. This is quite helpful for example before deployment to production instances, where a manager's approval might be required.

Create Branch/Merge Request for an Issue

A deeper integration between the issue tracking and the merge request parts of Visual Builder Studio is now possible. You can directly create a merge request and a code branch from the inside the details page for an issue in the issue tracking. This helps you track which issues are addressed in which branch of your code and what code changes relate to a specific issue.

Attachments in Merge Requests

You can now attach additional files to merge requests. For example. these can be images of related screenshots, design documents etc. This can give more context to the person reviewing the changes on what they are aiming to achieve. 

There's more

As with every release, we have even more new features available in the service – make sure to check our "What's New" document for the full list and for documentation links to specific features. We'll post blog entries that dive into specific features on the Visual Builder blog too.