Publish a Visual Application

You can publish a staged version of your application from the Home page or from the main menu.

After you publish a version of an app, it becomes read-only and can no longer be changed. If you want to make changes to update the app, you need to create a new version (see Update a Published Visual Application).

When you publish a staged version of your app, it becomes the live version. If you are updating an earlier version of your app, the previous live version is archived and locked. The URI of your app does not change. Only one version of an app can be live at a time, but multiple versions of an app can be staged simultaneously.

The first time you publish your app, you can choose if you want to copy the data from your staging database to the live database or use a clean database. When you update your app to a new version, you will be prompted to decide how you want to manage the data in your live database.

After an app is published, the resources used by the app (for example, metadata, images, stylesheets) will not change until you publish a new version. The resources of the published app are cached on the client and are fetched from the local cache instead of retrieved again from the server. An app's cached resources are replaced when the version of the app you retrieve is newer than the cached version.

Note:

Oracle recommends that you regularly re-stage and republish applications as new versions of Visual Builder are released. This ensures that your applications use the latest bug and security fixes available in the platform. From time to time, Oracle may issue notifications reminding you of this best practice, especially if a new release contains particularly critical fixes.

If the application you want to publish includes a mobile app, make sure you build the PWA-enabled mobile app to generate a QR code (see Build a Mobile Application as a PWA).

To publish your application:

1. On the Home page, locate the application you want to publish, then click the Application Options menu and select Publish:
   
   
   Description of the illustration homepage-options-menu.png
   

   If your staged application is open in the Designer, select Publish from the visual application's Menu in the toolbar.

2. In the Publish Application dialog box, select an option for handling the business object data:
   
   
   Description of the illustration homepage-publish-dialog1.png
   

   If you are updating the live version of the app, each time you publish you need to specify whether you want to keep the data in the live database, replace it with data from the staging database, or delete all data and start with a clean database:
   
   Description of the illustration publish-update-live.png
   

   The schemas for your app's databases (development, staging, and live) typically change when you create new versions. While you can't change the name the schema is created under, once a live app's schema is created, it will stay the same as long as you select Keep existing data in Live when you publish a new version. Use this option to retain the database schema over subsequent deployments to the same environment.

3. Click Publish to move the staged version of your application to the live server.

The application's status changes to Live in the Status column. To view the published app in your browser, click Live, then select your application. The application opens in a new browser tab. You can now share this URL with your users.