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:8888is the host and domain portionhr_demois the schema/applicationemployeesis 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:
- Edit the field titles
- Designate certain fields as required
- Define lists of values. See Use Lists of Values in an Excel Workbook.
Known Issues with ORDS
Refer to these known issues when planning to use Oracle REST Data Services:
- ORDS AutoREST provides PUT but not PATCH. See Update Existing Rows with PUT for more information.
- 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.