New Features in Visual Builder - August 2022

The new version of Oracle Visual Builder Studio is now available and adds a host of new features for developers leveraging Visual Builder to create and deploy applications. Over the next couple of weeks customers who access Visual Builder through the standalone service or as part of Oracle Integration Cloud will also get access to these features. Let's review some of the key highlights of this new release.

Declarative application/flow/page Security

You can now restrict access to your app or to sections of your app in a declarative way. In the new security section of the application, flow and page settings you can specify whether they require authentication as well as restrict access to specific roles - so only those roles will be able to access these sections.

Fragments enhancements

To further simplify leveraging fragments for creating reusable modules in your app, Visual Builder added a usage report for fragments helping you locate where is your fragment used in the app. In addition when your page contains a fragment, a new pencil icon in the visual editor directly takes you into edit mode for that fragment. 

Visual Editor Enhancements

As more and more components are added to the component palette, allowing you to create richer user interfaces, we wanted to simplify locating the right component. The components palette now groups components by categories that can be collapsed. You can also choose the way the components in each category are shows - in a grid or a list. Set your preference for easy navigation - and remember the search at the top for quickly finding the component you need.

When a page or a fragment contains input parameters, and a value for those is not provided we now show a warning in the design view. This can prevent confusion as to why the page is not behaving as expected, and provides a way to specify values for those parameters.

Business Objects Enhancements

We improved the way we are showing relationship and accessors between business objects in the field list and the object overview. 

A new refresh button was added so you can refresh the list of available tables and views in a database, when you create business objects on top of existing database schema. This helps you locate new objects that were created while you were working on your app.

And finally, a new instance level set of charts provide insight into the total storage used by your applications in the built-in database as well as a breakdown of the storage used by each application.

Audit and Test Automation

Two new declarative build steps in Visual Builder Studio let you run code audit and action chain tests as part of your CI/CD pipeline. With the new steps it is easy to incorporate checks that your application code passes audit and that your action chains pass their tests before you merge code changes or deploy them.

There is more

The above are the main new features in the new version but there are various other enhancements you can read about in our what's new documentation. If you have questions about any of the new features - post them on the Visual Builder discussion forum.

Here is a recording of the monthly office hours session we held about this new release: