What this book covers
Chapter 1, What, Why, and How (WWH) of Visual Builder, helps you to become familiar with the basics of VB to get you started with the platform. In order to use VB, you should know about all the tools and skills that are required for doing so, and this chapter focuses on all these basic concepts. It explains the VB architecture and describes how different components communicate with each other.
Chapter 2, Provisioning and Understanding the Visual Builder Instance, covers VB instance creation using the Oracle Cloud portal and what you should have before you create an instance. This is really important in terms of knowing how much you need to pay to use VB; this chapter focuses on the cost of using VB. We'll also look at how to log in to VB and the purpose of various navigation under VB.
Chapter 3, Exploring Visual Builder Ingredients, introduces the basic building blocks of VB, which are Business Objects, Service Connections, JET components, web applications, mobile applications, Action Chains, variables and their scopes, flows, sub-flows, pages, shells, and more, so that you can become familiar with all these basic building blocks to start your journey with VB.
Chapter 4, Creating and Managing Business Objects, focuses on Business Objects and how to manage them. Using examples, we'll demonstrate how to create a Business Object, modify it, and import and export data with it, with the help of .csv and .xlsx files. When you create Business Objects, different REST APIs are created automatically along with them, so we will explain how to use them. We will talk about how to switch VB embedded database to use a different Oracle database.
Chapter 5, Creating and Managing Service Connections, focuses on different options for Service Connection to connect to external REST APIs, Oracle Cloud APIs, and non-Oracle APIs. You will learn how to use a built-in catalog to create Service Connections with Oracle Cloud and Integration Cloud.
Chapter 6, Building a Web Application Using Real-World Examples, explains how to create web applications and connect with Business Objects and external REST APIs to pull and push data on VB Pages. We'll also see how to create different pages and how to connect them and pass data from one page to another. We will start using JavaScript to create different business logic whenever required and perform client-side validation for different UI components.
Chapter 7, Working with Life Cycle Events, Validations, and UI Logic, focuses on events, Action Chains, and various actions on an Action Chain that are used to create complex business logic, UI validations, enable logout features, and more. We will explore the different life cycle methods of VB to initialize and clean up tasks. We will create an example here to show you how to load data before page load and render that data on the page.
Chapter 8, Exploring Other Visual Components and Their Advanced Functionalities, discusses how to start using different Oracle JET (JET) components and explores the features of these components, such as searching, sorting, and pagination. You will learn how to enable inline editing in a table. You will work with dialogs, checkboxes, and list components. You will learn how to use different visualization components and load data.
Chapter 9, Extending Oracle and Non-Oracle SaaS Applications, demonstrates how to extend Oracle and non-Oracle applications using VB. The main intent of VB is to help you create SaaS extensions, and the details of this are described in this chapter. This chapter will cover enabling your VB application to render in different languages to accommodate a wide variety of audiences in different countries.
Chapter 10, Working with Business Processes, helps you to learn how to establish a connection with Processes and how to use business processes in VB to initiate, approve, and reject tasks from VB applications directly. Here you will start using various UI components to kick off processes.
Chapter 11, Building a Mobile Application with Live Examples, discusses how VB can be used to develop mobile applications for different devices. In this chapter, you will learn how to create PWAs using VB. You will create different pages, connect them with each other, and pass data between those pages. You will learn how to enable mobile applications to support both landscape and portrait mode. You will learn how to create builds for Android and iOS devices.
Chapter 12, Securing VB Applications, discusses how to secure your VB pages and data. VB applications can be used by anonymous users without login. You will learn how to enable role-based and data security in VB to secure your applications. You will also learn how to enable basic authentication for mobile applications.
Chapter 13, Understanding and Managing the Various Stages of a VB App, helps you to migrate your code from one instance to another. You will learn what does and does not get migrated. VB applications have different phases that we are going to talk about in this chapter.
Chapter 14, Best Practices and Recommendations for VB Applications, discusses the various best practices for developing an application that will enhance the performance of your applications. Following best practices while you create Business Objects and Service Connections will reduce your development and migration efforts too.
Chapter 15, Troubleshooting and Debugging VB Applications, discusses how to handle exceptions and enable logging so that debugging can be made easier at runtime. We will show you how to troubleshoot your development and production issues to make your life easier.
Chapter 16, Managing VB Apps Using Visual Builder Studio, demonstrates how to manage the VB code life cycle using Git repositories. In this chapter, we'll describe Oracle Visual Builder Studio and the benefits it offers. We'll demonstrate how to provision Oracle VB using the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) dashboard, which will help you manage DevOps for your VB code. We'll demonstrate how to create a project in Visual Builder Studio and create the empty Git repositories needed to manage a VB application.
Assessments contains the answers to the questions from all the chapters.