Common Tasks for Visual Applications

Because a visual application is a container for your web (and mobile) apps, you can manage things at the visual application level, meaning settings at this level will apply to all the web (and mobile) apps within the visual application.

Manage Visual Application Settings

You configure settings for a visual application in the Settings editor. To access the Settings editor, locate the application whose settings you want to change on the Visual Builder Home page. Click the Menu option in the upper-right corner, then select Settings:

Description of the illustration toolbar-settings-menu.png

The Settings editor includes several tabs that group related settings. Here's how you use the different settings tabs for a visual application:

Tab	Description
Application	Manage general and runtime dependency settings: General: Read-only values appear for settings such as your application ID, but you can configure the Vanity URL property. Visual Builder uses this setting when you use a custom URL for your app. See Specify a Custom App URL. Runtime Dependency: Client-side libraries that, along with the accompanying version of Oracle JET, determine features and enhancements available to your visual application. See Manage Runtime Dependencies for Visual Applications.
Translations	Download the strings that appear in the user interface of your visual application's web (and mobile) apps to import into a third-party translation tool for translation. You then upload the translated strings from the translation tool to use for those apps that support different languages. See Work with Translations.
Application Profiles	Deploy your app with different settings depending on the environment. For example, you won’t want to use a production REST service with access to live customer data when developing an app. Instead, you’ll use a development or test instance of the service. Once you complete development and your app is deployed to production, you’ll want it to connect to the production REST service. Application profiles help manage the switch between the different instances of the REST service. Application profiles can be associated with your application's backends and service connections, as well as user roles. They can also be mapped to environment-specific schema when you bring your own database schema for business objects. Note: Application profiles belonging to visual applications created on Visual Builder Studio and deployed to a Visual Builder instance may at times be marked as disabled on your instance. While you won't be able to readily remove disabled profiles, you can't duplicate, rename, or change their configuration either.
Team	Collaborate with others on the visual application. Only users who have been added to the app as team members can edit an app or perform lifecycle operations. See Add Team Members.
User Roles	Control access to business objects and data in your apps based on a person’s user role. See Authentication Roles Versus User Roles.
Business Objects	Retrieve the API for the catalog of endpoints exposed by business objects in your visual application. Other settings in this tab configure client’s access to this API. You can configure anonymous access, basic authentication, or get an access token that a client can use. See Allow External Access to Your Business Objects and Get an Access Token for Authentication.

Add Team Members

Add team members to an application to enable other developers in the identity domain to contribute to developing the application.

To allow other team members to collaborate on the same application, you need to explicitly add the name of each team member in the application’s Settings editor. As an admin, you can see all applications, but you cannot act on the app unless you are a team member. Your admin access, however, will let you add yourself to the app when you want to edit it or perform other lifecycle operations.

To add a team member to an application:

1. Open your web (or mobile) and choose Settings in the application’s Menu in the toolbar.
   
   
   Description of the illustration toolbar-settings-menu.png
   

   Alternatively, on the Oracle Visual Builder Home page, locate the application where you want to change the settings and choose Settings in the Application Options menu.

2. Open the Team tab in the Settings editor.

   The Team tab contains a Members panel that displays a list of current team members. The tab also displays a History panel that displays the time of the last update to the application and the name of the team member who made the update.

   
   

   
   Description of the illustration homepage-team-members.png

   
   
3. In the Members panel, select a team member’s email from the dropdown list. Click Add.
   The drop-down list displays the email addresses of all the members in your identity domain who can be added to the application as developers.

Export and Import Application Resources

You can import and export a visual application's resources to share source files and to move applications between instances.

Export Application Resources

You might want to export an application’s resources when you want to import them into another application or share them with a team member. Exporting an application downloads its resources as a ZIP archive to your local file system.

To export an application’s resources:

1. Open your web (or mobile) application and choose Export in the application’s Menu option in the toolbar.
   
   
   Description of the illustration toolbar-settings-menu.png
   

   Alternatively, on the Visual Builder Home page, locate the application and choose Export in the Application Options menu.

2. If your application contains business objects, you can choose to include the data stored in the objects when exporting the application:
   
   
   Description of the illustration export-application-dialog1.png
   

An archive that includes the application's resources is downloaded to your local file system, in the location specified for your browser’s downloads.

If you exported the application with data, the archive will include a JSON file (entity.json) and a spreadsheet (entity-data.csv) for each business object. The JSON file describes the business object and the spreadsheet contains the business object data. If you chose to export the application without data, the archive will only contain the JSON file describing the business objects.

The archive will always include the data for any business objects that are identified as containing Application Setup Data.

If user roles are defined for the application, the role-mapping definition (which maps user roles to IDCS groups) will be copied to a JSON file (role-mapping.json) and included in the exported application archive.

Import Application Resources

You can import resources to replace an existing visual application's source files with those from an archive of another visual application.

To import resources from one application to another:

1. Click Import.
2. In the Import Resources dialog box, drag the ZIP archive of an exported visual application into the Drag and Drop area, or click in the drop area to locate the archive on your local system.
3. If you to want to replace all the existing files (and prevent duplication), select Delete existing files and resources to delete all files in the existing visual application.
4. Click Import.
   The resources are imported into the root directory of your visual application.