Effortless App Development with Oracle Visual Builder

Effortless App Development with Oracle Visual Builder

by Ankur Jain
Released March 2021
Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
ISBN: 9781800569805

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Book description

Build web and mobile apps quickly with Oracle Visual Builder and delve into real-time end-to-end use cases, exploring best practices, recommendations, security, and debugging techniques

Key Features

  • Execute various real-time use cases and develop web and mobile applications quickly
  • Enhance your skills by extending Oracle and non-Oracle SaaS applications using VB
  • Gain the knowledge needed to take on projects directly and work independently

Book Description

Organizations are moving their applications, data, and processes to the cloud to reduce application costs, effort, and maintenance. However, adopting new technology poses challenges for developers, solutions architects, and designers due to a lack of knowledge and appropriate practical training resources. This book helps you get to grips with Oracle Visual Builder (VB) and enables you to quickly develop web and mobile applications and deploy them to production without hassle.

This book will provide you with a solid understanding of VB so that you can adopt it at a faster pace and start building applications right away. After working with real-time examples to learn about VB, you'll discover how to design, develop, and deploy web and mobile applications quickly. You'll cover all the VB components in-depth, including web and mobile application development, business objects, and service connections. In order to use all these components, you'll also explore best practices, security, and recommendations, which are well explained within the chapters. Finally, this book will help you gain the knowledge you need to enhance the performance of an application before deploying it to production.

By the end of this book, you will be able to work independently and deploy your VB applications efficiently and with confidence.

What you will learn

  • Get started with VB and explore its architecture and basic building blocks
  • Gain a clear understanding of business objects and learn how to manage them
  • Create service connections to connect to the external API and Oracle SaaS
  • Build web and mobile apps and run them on various devices
  • Develop Oracle Cloud and non-Oracle SaaS app extensions
  • Get to grips with data and application security using practical examples
  • Explore best practices along with troubleshooting and debugging mechanisms
  • Connect your VB application with VBS for application versioning using Git

Who this book is for

This book is for IT professionals working with UI technologies to develop web and mobile applications for various industries. Developers and UI designers who want to understand how to use VB, develop scalable web and mobile applications using drag-and-drop features, and design applications in a better way with the help of real-time example apps and code samples will find this book helpful. Prior experience in any UI technology, JavaScript, and REST APIs will be useful.

Table of contents

  1. Effortless App Development with Oracle Visual Builder
  2. Foreword
  3. Contributors
  4. About the author
  5. About the reviewer
  6. Preface
    1. Who this book is for
    2. What this book covers
    3. To get the most out of this book
    4. Download the example code files
    5. Download the color images
    6. Conventions used
    7. Get in touch
    8. Reviews
  7. Section 1: Exploring the Building Blocks of VB
  8. Chapter 1: What, Why, and How (WWH) of Visual Builder
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Introducing VB
    3. Reviewing the features and benefits of VB
    4. Knowing the tools required to use VB
    5. Knowing the technologies used in VB
    6. Understanding the VB architecture
    7. Summary
    8. Questions
  9. Chapter 2: Provisioning and Understanding the Visual Builder Instance
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Provisioning a VB instance
      1. Creating an instance using Quick Start
      2. Creating a custom instance
    3. Creating users and assigning roles
      1. Adding a user to IDCS
      2. Assigning a role to a user
    4. Deriving the cost of using VB
    5. Accessing the VB instance
      1. Accessing VB via the Visual Builder instance page
      2. Accessing VB using a direct URL
    6. Exploring various navigations of VB
      1. All Applications
      2. Settings
      3. Certificates
    7. Summary
    8. Questions
  10. Chapter 3: Exploring Visual Builder Ingredients
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Creating a VB application
    3. Understanding Business Objects
      1. Working with Business Objects
    4. Exploring Service Connections
      1. Various options to create a Service Connection
    5. Understanding variables, their types, and their scopes
    6. Understanding implicit objects of VB
    7. Exploring events and Action Chains
      1. Events
      2. Action Chains
      3. Actions inside an Action Chain
    8. Understanding the application's structure
    9. Understanding the various editors and the application designer
    10. Summary
    11. Questions
  11. Section 2: Working with Data and Services
  12. Chapter 4: Creating and Managing Business Objects
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Creating and modifying a Business Object
      1. Creating a Business Object
      2. Modifying a Business Object
      3. Adding a formula to a field
      4. Creating a relationship between Business Objects
    3. Creating business rules in a Business Object
      1. Creating Object Triggers
      2. Creating Field Triggers
      3. Creating Object Validators
      4. Creating Field Validators
      5. Creating Object Functions
    4. Managing Business Object data
      1. Exporting bulk data
      2. Importing bulk data
      3. Importing data from a different database
      4. Importing a Business Object
    5. Exploring Business Object REST APIs
      1. Resource APIs
      2. Resource Cache Control
      3. Endpoints
    6. Switching to a different database
    7. Summary
    8. Questions
  13. Chapter 5: Creating and Managing Service Connections
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Managing backends in visual applications
      1. Overriding the backends
      2. Adding a new backend
    3. Creating application profiles
    4. Creating a Service Connection from a REST endpoint
      1. Creating a No code API account
      2. Creating a Service Connection from an endpoint
    5. Creating a Service Connection from a service specification
    6. Creating a Service Connection using an inbuilt catalog
      1. Creating a Service Connection with Integration Cloud
      2. Creating a Service Connection with Oracle Cloud Applications
    7. Managing Service Connections
      1. Adding a server to the Service Connection
      2. Adding more endpoints to the Service Connection
    8. Summary
    9. Questions
  14. Chapter 6: Building Web Applications Using Real-World Examples
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Building a web application and connecting it to the Business Object
      1. Creating a web page to read all employees
      2. Creating a web page to onboard a new employee
      3. Creating a web page to update existing employee details
      4. A button for deleting the selected employee
      5. Testing the web application
    3. Connecting a web application with external REST APIs
      1. Creating a Service Connection with an external API
      2. Creating a new web page
      3. Listing the data from the external API
    4. Changing the default flow and the default page of a flow
    5. Navigating between pages, flows, and passing parameters between pages
      1. Navigating between pages
      2. Navigating between flows
      3. Passing parameters between pages
    6. Working with JavaScript
      1. Creating a new page
      2. Writing a JavaScript function
      3. Registering an event on buttons and calling a JS function
    7. Summary
    8. Questions
  15. Chapter 7: Working with Life Cycle Events, Validations, and UI Logic
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Exploring life cycle events
      1. vbBeforeEnter
      2. vbEnter
      3. vbBeforeExit
      4. vbExit
    3. Loading data on page load
      1. Creating a type and an ADP variable
      2. Registering the vbEnter event and loading the Employee Business Object data
      3. Populating the Employee Business Object data
    4. Showing a parent-child relationship on a page
      1. Creating a table to populate the addresses
      2. Implementing the logic to show the address of the selected employee
    5. Enabling client-side validation on forms
      1. Creating a new web form
      2. Creating JavaScript to validate a form
      3. Implementing logic to validate a form and insert data into a Business Object
    6. Working with various UI logic
      1. Hiding/showing UI components
      2. Calculating fields
      3. Enabling a logout feature
      4. Validating an input component using a regex
    7. Creating dependent Lists Of Values
    8. Summary
    9. Further reading
    10. Questions
  16. Section 3: Building Web and Mobile Apps Using Various VB Components
  17. Chapter 8: Exploring Other Visual Components and Their Advanced Functionalities
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Developing an editable table
      1. Populating the table from the Business Object using the ADP variable
      2. Registering events on the table
      3. Implementing the logic to support inline editing in a table
      4. Adding a button to save all modified records
    3. Enabling sorting, column resizing, searching, and pagination in a table
      1. Enabling/disabling sorting on the table
      2. Enabling/disabling column resizing
      3. Filtering data from a table
      4. Implementing pagination
    4. Working with dialogs
      1. Using the dialog component
      2. Opening and closing the dialog on an action
      3. Implementing the logic to delete a user
    5. Working with checkboxes
      1. Creating a checkbox with static data
      2. Creating a checkbox with dynamic data
    6. Working with List View
      1. Showing data in the Card Layout view
    7. Working with visualization components
      1. Creating a bar chart
      2. Creating a pie chart
      3. Creating an area chart
    8. Summary
    9. Further reading
    10. Questions
  18. Chapter 9: Extending Oracle and Non-Oracle SaaS Applications
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Extending a Salesforce application
      1. Pre-requisites for extending the Salesforce app
      2. Creating a Service Connection
      3. Listing and creating accounts
      4. Listing opportunities
      5. Creating opportunities
    3. Extending an Oracle Cloud application
      1. Adding an accounts REST endpoint
      2. Listing and updating the accounts
      3. Adding nomination functionality
    4. Creating a multilingual application
      1. Configuring an application to set the selected language locale
      2. Generating translatable strings
      3. Downloading and uploading the bundle
      4. Adding a language switcher
    5. Summary
    6. Questions
  19. Chapter 10: Working with Business Processes
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Adding the Process backend
    3. Registering the business processes
    4. Initiating the process from the VB application
    5. Managing process tasks
    6. Extracting the data object
    7. Configuring a connection to a process server
    8. Summary
    9. Further reading
    10. Questions
  20. Chapter 11: Building a Mobile Application with Live Examples
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Developing a mobile application
    3. Developing a doctor's appointment mobile application
      1. Booking an appointment
      2. Listing the appointments
    4. Configuring mobile application settings
    5. Enabling PWA support for mobile applications
      1. A few restrictions regarding the PWA app
    6. Defining a build configuration for different devices
      1. Build configuration for Android
      2. Build configuration for iOS
    7. Summary
    8. Further reading
    9. Questions
  21. Section 4: Security, Recommendations, Best Practices, and Troubleshooting
  22. Chapter 12: Securing VB Applications
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Understanding authentication roles and user roles
    3. Enabling anonymous access
      1. Anonymous access for web or mobile applications
      2. Anonymous access for Business Objects
      3. Anonymous access for Service Connections
    4. Creating and managing user roles
    5. Enabling role-based security
    6. Enabling data security
    7. Understanding Service Connection authentication and connection type
      1. Identity propagation
      2. Fixed credentials
    8. Configuring basic authentication for a mobile app
      1. A few restrictions when using basic authentication for a mobile app
    9. Summary
    10. Further reading
    11. Questions
  23. Chapter 13: Understanding and Managing Various Stages of a VB App
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Managing the VB application
      1. Glancing at the different application statuses
    3. Versioning of the VB application
    4. Cloning the VB application
    5. Promoting the VB application
      1. Exporting the application
      2. Importing the application
    6. Staging and publishing the VB application
      1. Staging the VB application
      2. Publishing the VB application
    7. Adding team members to the application
    8. Summary
    9. Questions
  24. Chapter 14: Best Practices and Recommendations for VB Applications
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Best practices and recommendations for enhancing an app's performance
      1. Reusability of the Action Chain
      2. Environment-specific values
      3. Using the Run in parallel action
      4. Caching the Select (Single) data
      5. Regular restaging and republication
      6. Using application profiles
      7. Optimizing the application
      8. Avoiding deprecated components
      9. Meaningful names of actions and variables
    3. Best practices for using Business Objects
      1. Using the Contains Application Setup Data option
      2. Data validation and calculation
      3. Enabling security
      4. Enabling data caching
    4. Best practices for using Service Connections
      1. Adding multiple endpoints to the same server
      2. Using the fine-tuned REST APIs
      3. Caching the data
      4. Getting the data in chunks
      5. Using the inbuilt catalog
    5. Summary
    6. Further reading
    7. Questions
  25. Chapter 15: Troubleshooting and Debugging VB Applications
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Learning about the tools for debugging applications
    3. Tracking REST calls
    4. Logging the data to debug issues
      1. JavaScript logging
      2. Action Chain logging
      3. Business Object logging
    5. Debugging the application code
    6. Exception handling
      1. Handling REST API exceptions
      2. Handling data-level issues
    7. Summary
    8. Further reading
    9. Questions
  26. Chapter 16: Managing VB Apps Using Visual Builder Studio
    1. Technical requirements
    2. Understanding VB Studio
    3. Provisioning VB Studio
      1. Accessing the Visual Builder Studio instance
    4. Creating a project in VB Studio
    5. Connecting VB to VB Studio and a Git repository
      1. Connecting to the Git repository
    6. Managing VB apps using Git repositories
      1. Pushing code from VB
      2. Modifying the code files
      3. Pulling Git updates using the VB console
      4. Importing the application from VB Studio Git
    7. Summary
    8. Further reading
    9. Questions
  27. Assessments
    1. Chapter 1, What, Why, and How (WWH) of Visual Builder
    2. Question 1
    3. Answer
    4. Question 2
    5. Answer
    6. Chapter 2, Provisioning and Understanding the Visual Builder Instance
    7. Question 1
    8. Answer
    9. Question 2
    10. Answer
    11. Question 3
    12. Answer
    13. Question 4
    14. Answer
    15. Question 5
    16. Answer
    17. Chapter 3, Exploring Visual Builder Ingredients
    18. Question 1
    19. Answer
    20. Question 2
    21. Answer
    22. Question 3
    23. Answer
    24. Question 4
    25. Answer
    26. Question 5
    27. Answer
    28. Question 6
    29. Answer
    30. Chapter 4, Creating and Managing Business Objects
    31. Question 1
    32. Answer
    33. Question 2
    34. Answer
    35. Question 3
    36. Answer
    37. Question 4
    38. Answer
    39. Question 5
    40. Answer
    41. Question 6
    42. Answer
    43. Question 7
    44. Answer
    45. Chapter 5, Creating and Managing Service Connections
    46. Question 1
    47. Answer
    48. Question 2
    49. Answer
    50. Question 3
    51. Answer
    52. Question 4
    53. Answer
    54. Question 5
    55. Answer
    56. Chapter 6, Building Web Applications Using Real-World Examples
    57. Question 1
    58. Answer
    59. Question 2
    60. Answer
    61. Question 3
    62. Answer
    63. Chapter 7, Working with Life Cycle Events, Validations, and UI Logic
    64. Question 1
    65. Answer
    66. Question 2
    67. Answer
    68. Question 3
    69. Answer
    70. Chapter 8, Exploring Other Visual Components and Their Advanced Functionalities
    71. Question 1
    72. Answer
    73. Question 2
    74. Answer
    75. Question 3
    76. Answer
    77. Chapter 9, Extending Oracle and Non-Oracle SaaS Applications
    78. Question 1
    79. Answer
    80. Question 2
    81. Answer
    82. Question 3
    83. Answer
    84. Question 4
    85. Answer
    86. Chapter 10, Working with Business Processes
    87. Question 1
    88. Answer
    89. Question 2
    90. Answer
    91. Chapter 11, Building Mobile Application with Live Examples
    92. Question 1
    93. Answer
    94. Question 2
    95. Answer
    96. Chapter 12, Securing the VB Applications
    97. Question 1
    98. Answer
    99. Question 2
    100. Answer
    101. Question 3
    102. Answer
    103. Chapter 13, Understanding and Managing Various Stages of a VB App
    104. Question 1
    105. Answer
    106. Question 2
    107. Answer
    108. Question 3
    109. Answer
    110. Chapter 14, Best Practices and Recommendations for VB Applications
    111. Question 1
    112. Answer
    113. Chapter 15, Troubleshooting and Debugging VB Applications
    114. Question 1
    115. Answer
    116. Question 2
    117. Answer
    118. Question 3
    119. Answer
    120. Chapter 16, Managing the VB Apps Using Visual Builder Studio
    121. Question 1
    122. Answer
    123. Question 2
    124. Answer
    125. Question 3
    126. Answer
    127. Question 4
    128. Answer
    129. Why subscribe?
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Product information

  • Title: Effortless App Development with Oracle Visual Builder
  • Author(s): Ankur Jain
  • Release date: March 2021
  • Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
  • ISBN: 9781800569805