Oracle REST Data Services

Oracle Visual Builder Add-in for Excel supports Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) when you provide OpenAPI service metadata for an ORDS service. ORDS with AutoREST can provide an OpenAPI service metadata document.

For example, use http(s)://myhost.example.com:8888/ords/hr_demo/open-api-catalog/employees/ where:

  • myhost.example.com:8888 is the host and domain portion
  • hr_demo is the schema/application
  • employees is the database table

For information about AutoREST, see Automatic Enabling of Schema Objects for REST Access (AutoREST) in the Oracle REST Data Services Developer's Guide.

For manually-created REST services using ORDS, you'll need to define modules, templates, and handlers in order to get an OpenAPI service metadata document. See Manually Creating RESTful Services Using SQL and PL/SQL in the Oracle REST Data Services Developer's Guide.

After importing ORDS service metadata, you can use the Business Object Field Editor to provide additional information about each field to improve the overall user experience. For example:

Known Issues with ORDS

Refer to these known issues when planning to use Oracle REST Data Services:

  • In some cases, the ORDS server returns Create Failed for rows, when in fact the Create operation was successful. Re-downloading rows into the table will show the created rows.
  • With an ORDS service, the PUT operation on the item path performs an "upsert" (see Update/Insert Table Row in Oracle REST Data Services Developer's Guide). So if you are about to update an existing row and someone else deletes that row, your update attempt may re-create that row. There's no warning or notice when this behavior occurs.