In the previous post we introduced the new App UI feature that simplifies building Oracle Cloud Application extensions and showed how to build a new user interface on top of data coming from Oracle SaaS's objects. In this post we show further capabilities that let you leverage and mash-up other sources of data in your extension. 

Using Custom Objects

If your application extension needs to track some additional information that is not part of the core business objects that Oracle SaaS provides, you can create custom objects to store that data using the Application Composer tool that is part of Oracle SaaS. To do this, you create a sandbox and access the Application Composer interface. Then you can create new objects with specific fields and even define business logic and security for those objects. Once those objects are created – you can leverage Visual Builder to create the user interface that will interact with them.

Oracle SaaS custom objects expose a set of REST APIs that will let you perform CRUD operations on their data. The set of APIs is described in meta-data using an Oracle ADF describe format. Visual Builder knows how to parse that meta-data and provides out-of-the-box advanced functionality such as query by example, pagination, and sorting when working with the custom objects.

In the demo video below we show how to access the describe meta-data, add it to an App UI extension, and then build a user interface that lets you interact with the data.

Important update – since the demo was recorded there was an update to how you access the describe information to a custom object. See our updated documentation on accessing custom objects. The format of the URL to access the describe should be – <backend URL path>/<REST-API-version>:<REST-Framework-version>/describe.openapi/<resource-name> rather than the approach shown in the video. So if the describe location you copy from app composers shows as: https://yourserver/crmRestApi/resources/latest/DonorGift_c/describe – you'll switch it to: https://yourserver/crmRestApi/resources/latest:9/describe.openapi/DonorGift_c

(If you are not familiar with creating custom objects with App Composer – here is a quick demo that shows how we created the object used in the App UI app).

Using External REST Services

If you need to access data that is outside of Oracle SaaS and integrate it into your App UI Oracle Apps Extension, then you can leverage REST services. Visual Builder lets you add REST services as additional data sources to your app. One limitation, in the current version, is that these external REST service can't require authentication. If you need to mash-up data from external REST services that do require authentication, use a regular Visual Builder instance and create a stand-alone app. Then you can leverage the capabilities of the VB REST proxy to authenticate and handle CORS when accessing REST data sources.

In the demo below we show how easy it is to consume an external REST data source, and integrate it into the same App UI extension that access your SaaS data – passing parameters from the SaaS data to the REST service.

To learn more about building these type of App UI extension check out our documenation.