Over the weekend we started the roll out of the new May release (2207 version) of Oracle Visual Builder. In this blog we highlight key new capabilities in this release. If you want to see quick demos of these new features check out the recording of the Oracle VB office hours covering these new features.
New Flow Diagram
The flow diagram now has a new view option that shows you navigation between pages in the flow with arrows. This helps you better understand relationships and interactions between pages in your application. In addition you can now use the visual flow diagram to create pages and navigation action chains in them simply by dragging and dropping items into the diagram.
Application Profiles for Business Objects BYOS
In the previous release we introduced the ability to create business objects in Visual Builder on top of existing tables in external databases. In the new release we added support for using separate DB schemas for each life cycle of your app. So for example you could use one schema during your development and stage of the app, but switch to another schema in the DB for the production data. This is integrated directly with the application profiles feature of Visual Builder and can also be used in deployment steps in CI/CD pipelines in Visual Builder Studio.
Custom Actions
Visual Builder provides various declarative actions that you can include in action chains, and now you can add your own custom actions. Developers can define actions that can then be reused across multiple action chains in the application by any other developer. This is a great way to increase reusability while developing for common code snippets. A custom action is implemented with JavaScript and uses metadata to define input and output parameters for the action. Once defined, you can drag and drop it into your action chains.
New Input Formats for REST Services
You can now define and test REST endpoints that consume Form-Data and Binary payloads in Visual Builder service connection interface. We added interfaces that allow you to specify the content type expected and easily provide input in the right format. This simplifies integration with a wider set of REST data sources.
Transform Functions
When working with external REST services in Visual Builder you sometime need to provide a transform function that tells VB how to execute advanced functionality such as query, pagination and sort on endpoints. You can now define these transform functions directly at the backend and server layers – which will then apply to all the endpoints that are coming from that backend or server (unless you overwrite it at the endpoint level).
Fragments Enhancements
Fragments – the reusable UI you define in your app – now show up in the component palette while you design pages in Visual Builder – this makes it easier for developers to discover and use these components. In addition you can now define meta-data on the fragments that control how and when it will show up in the component palette.
Developer Productivity
As with every other release we are adding various small enhancements to the visual design experience that would make developers more productive. In this version you'll notice such things as new ways to display and sort the components in the component palette, automatic shading of components in the structure pane based on visibility, and more.
There's More
These are just some of the new features in this release. We encourage you to read our what's new documentation covering the new features. We'll be posting blog entries about some of these new features in more details in the next days – so keep an eye open to learn more.