The new version of Oracle Visual Builder is hitting the streets with a bunch of new features – learn about the key new capabilities in this blog, and join our upcoming Visual Builder Office Hours to learn more. The features are already available if you are using Visual Builder Studio, and will be available in Visual Builder Standalone and Oracle Integration instances as those get updated based on your selected upgrade window.
Visual App Development
PWA for Web Apps
Deploying mobile apps as Progressive Web Apps for easier distribution has been supported in VB for a while now. With this release we are extending PWA packaging to web apps too. This will allow you to create responsive web apps that your clients can add to their mobile devices as mobile apps. The apps will work outside of the browser in their own window giving users a native like experience. Updates that you'll publish to these apps will automatically be propagated to the devices. We also provide a default page that will show up if their device is offline when they invoke the app.
Action Chains in Separate Files
New action chain that you develop in your app are going to be stored in separate json file from your page's main json file. This separation will reduce the cases where developers need to merge code and resolve conflicts when two developers work on the same page. It will also reduce the size of the page files themselves and help maintainability and design time performance. We also have an option that will let you migrate existing action chains to their own separate files to help with the maintenance of existing apps.
New Page Flow Diagram
Our UI designers created a new way to look at your application structure that is more aligned with Oracle's Redwood methodology. You can more easily see the hierarchy of your application, the flows and inner flows, default pages, and navigation paths all in a complete new re-designed interface.
Redwood Icons Gallery
Want to implement the innovative Redwood design in your apps – now you can leverage the collection of new icons developed by Oracle design team in your own apps using the new Redwood icon gallery. Browse hundreds of icons to choose the best fit for your needs.
Git Stash Support
Git Stash operations allow you to save code changes without committing them into your code base. This is useful when you need to switch the context of your work, but don't want to lose the work you've done so far. You can now stash code changes, which will get your code back to the status it was in before your changes. Then you can complete the other work you need to accomplish – commit it and then recall from stash when you ready to continue working on your original task.
Git Diffs for File
While working on a file you can now compare your version with other revisions of the file to visually see the diffs in code directly in Visual Builder Studio.
Business Objects Tracing
A new tracing capability has been added to Visual Builder's business objects. When you execute CRUD operations or invoke functions on business objects we track the execution and provide you with information on the duration of each action. You can then drill down to see a visual representation of the operations taking place and the length of time for each segment. Another level of drilling will get you the full explain plan for the database interactions. This information helps in locating and fixing bottlenecks in your app and to fine tune apps for better performance.
For long running groovy based functions you can leverage a new setting that lets you overwrite the default timeout for operations on the BO. This can be useful if you know that you have a process that takes time and you want to wait for it to finish without timing it out. (both these feature require your server to be on 21.10).
DevOps Features
CI/CD for Oracle Integrations
New steps in the VB Studio's build jobs enable you to export and import integrations between Oracle Integration Cloud instances. These steps work with the Environment feature in VB Studio to allow you to pick up integrations from one environment and promote them to another for example from dev to prod.
Enhanced Changed Files Review
We improved the changed files browsing capabilities for Git merge requests to allow you to better focus code review when commits contain large sets of files. You can select to filter new, changed, or removed files, and search the change set for specific files. This allows you to focus the view to see only the content of files that matter to you.
Enhanced Peer Code Review
While going through a merge request of code changes Visual Builder lets team member conduct code review and provide comments on specific code lines. In the new version comments can be marked as needing attentions, addressed, and resolved. This allows a team to better trace discussions and the resolution of comments. In addition you can customize your conversations view to show or hide specific types of items, for example hide resolved comments.
By the way, people who haven't been added to a code review process, can now add themselves to a review to provide feedback.
Enhancements to User Groups
VB Studio lets you define groups of users and then use these groups in various places in your project. For example, you can add a group to review a code change. These groups can be imported from IDCS role groups, and with this release they are also automatically synchronize with changes in IDCS letting you control membership from a single location.
Another enhancement is the ability for non-admins to create user groups. Any project member is now able to create a new user group that will be used in the project.
Finally, you can now use groups to control access to build jobs. You can mark jobs as private and assign it to a group, then only members of that group will be able to execute and configure the job.
Other Usability Enhancements
- When creating business object fields you can now directly create calculated and aggregated fields.
- Default page size in the designer is "fit to canvas" leveraging the maximum space available in your layout.
- Nested flow section only shows when sub-flows exist .
- UI redesign for the VM Build Executor management in your Visual Builder Studio organizations are.
There's More
There are various other new features in Oracle Visual Builder and Oracle Visual Builder Studio – take a few minutes and read about them in our "What's New' document. Got any questions about the new features – ask them on our technical forum.