1. Building Responsive Applications with Visual Builder Studio
  2. Manage Applications
  3. Preview, Share, and Deploy Visual Applications
  4. What Happens When You Share and Deploy Visual Applications?

What Happens When You Share and Deploy Visual Applications?

As you design and develop your application, you'll want to test it out as it will look to your user. The simplest way to do this is to use Preview Preview Button in the visual application's header. This option opens your application in another browser tab, enabling you to preview the application you're working on in the Designer.

The preview window for your web (or mobile) app is only visible to you. When you're ready to share your work with other team members or users, you'll use Share, a Menu option in the upper right corner of the visual application's header. This option deploys the visual application to your environment's Visual Builder instance, but without pushing your code to the project’s Git repository. As project members, you and your teammates can then access the shared visual application from the Deployments tab of the Environments page; users will need the URL of the app deployed to the Visual Builder instance.

After the visual application is tested and you are ready to make your changes public, you use the Publish option in the header to deploy your visual application. A successful Publish merges your changes to the project's default branch (usually, main) and triggers the build and deploy jobs in the pipeline set up when your visual application's project was initially created. This pipeline deploys your visual application, with the applications it contains, to your environment's Visual Builder instance.

For deployment to be successful, your organization must have purchased a separate Visual Builder instance that your organization administrator has set up for you to deploy applications from your VB Studio instance. This includes entering authorization details in the Oracle Deployment step of the deployment job to permit access to the Visual Builder instance. See Configure the Deployment Job in Administering Visual Builder Studio.

For applications that you've deployed, VB Studio provides a number of tools to help you manage your deployed application. These include the ability to:
  • Undeploy an application that's been deployed
  • Roll back to a previous version of an application that you deployed
  • Display a version number in the URL of a deployed app (usually, during development) or display "live" in the URL (usually, when the app is deployed to production)
  • Lock and unlock a deployed application

    When you lock a deployed application, your users see a notification message that the application is locked for maintenance. They are unable to use it, or edit data managed by the web app.

  • Specify a custom app URL (sometimes known as a vanity URL)

    You specify a custom app URL when you do not want to use the default URL that VB Studio generates for your application.

Note:

Sharing or deploying a visual application will generate corresponding "app clients" on the target Visual Builder runtime instance. An app client is needed for the services and IDCS roles in your application to work. You can delete an app client when it is no longer needed, for example, when you no longer need a shared application, you can delete the shared app's app client.