What Can You Do with Oracle Visual Builder Studio?

VB Studio gives you the power to customize Oracle Cloud Applications to suit your company’s specific business needs. In fact, you’ll have the exact same tools at your disposal—Visual Builder Studio and Oracle Javascript Extension Toolkit (JET)—that internal Oracle developers use to create Oracle Cloud Applications in the first place, giving you an unprecedented level of power and control over your Oracle Cloud Apps ecosystem.

Take a look at some of the common use cases you can easily achieve with VB Studio:

• In the Digital Sales application, you want the employees’ view of a given page to be exactly as it came from Oracle, but you want managers to see a field that doesn’t even exist in Oracle’s original app—one that computes the sales rep’s commission based on the sales amount for each completed deal. You simply create a layout that includes a custom field to calculate the commission amount for the managers’ view, then create a rule that displays that layout only when the user is a manager.
• Suppose you need to add new content to a page in an Oracle Cloud Application. If there’s a dynamic container on that page that’s marked as extensible, you can use that container to display things like text fields, images, or even a button that starts a chain of events (known as an action chain). You can even include data from custom objects you created in Application Composer in your App UI, and make certain fields customizable by your users.
• Need your own set of pages? Create an App UI, which will look and feel exactly like all the other Oracle Cloud Applications in your instance. You can link to this App UI from an existing Oracle Cloud Application, to make it appear as though your custom pages are part of the app itself, or make the App UI accessible as a separate module from Oracle’s new Ask Oracle menu.
• On another page in the Digital Sales app, you want an error to appear if a user enters a number less than 100 or greater than 10,000 in the Discount field, even though the original field contains no such value checking. Just set a simple field validator on the Discount field, and any number outside that range will be instantly flagged.
• You know that the users who will be customizing the Oracle Connections app for your firm will need access to confidential employee information provided by a REST API that is usually tightly controlled. To prevent each customizer from having to request access to this REST API, you create a service connection to this data in an extension, thereby allowing each person who needs the data to gain access to it simply by adding the extension as a dependency. (Note that while a service connection does provides access to data, it does not impose any kind of data security.)

All of these scenarios can be implemented in VB Studio by creating an extension for one or more App UIs, which is the primary focus of this guide. However, some scenarios require users to create a bespoke responsive application instead of an App UI, particularly when they require certain capabilities that App UIs don’t currently provide. You might consider this option if you need to:

• Access REST data sources with advanced authentication protocols;
• Create custom business objects in your own database;
• Run an application outside of Oracle Cloud Applications;
• Provide application access to users who don’t have Oracle Cloud Application credentials:
• Create a customized look and feel.

If you have one or more of these requirements, you can create a responsive application (using either Visual Builder or Visual Builder Studio) and deploy it to a standalone Visual Builder runtime environment. Just like App UIs, a responsive application can access Oracle Cloud Application data through the service catalog, as well as leverage Redwood templates and components. If desired, you can even embed such applications into an Oracle Cloud Application or other web site, using the technique described in Embed a Web App in an Oracle Cloud Application.