6 Preview and Share Your Application Extension

The Preview and Share actions enable you and other team members to see how your app extension will look and behave in the Oracle Cloud Application without building and deploying it to your development environment.

Preview Your Application

Before committing your changes to the branch, you can use the Preview action to see how your pages look and behave in a browser.

As the name implies, Preview shows you how your pages are displayed and gives you a chance to test the behavior of your app extension before sharing it with others. In the preview you can check the rule sets, layouts, the navigation between pages, and what happens when you add and edit data. While the data in the preview comes from your Cloud Application, you can freely make changes in the preview because the data is only stored in the test environment used for the preview. So you could test a form and edit fields and it wouldn't affect the data stored in the Oracle Cloud Application's data storage.

When you use Preview to view your application, you'll see the pages as they look based on your user role. This means that if the application has any rule sets that evaluate the user's role, this will affect the data you see in the pages. If you want to apply a different layout, you'll have to exit Preview mode and follow the instructions in Preview Different Dynamic Layouts.

To preview your application:

1. Open a page in your application.
2. Click Preview in the header to open the application preview in your browser.
   
   

   
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   When you click Preview, you'll see a notification to let you know that the preview will soon be ready:

   
   

   
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The application preview opens to the page you were working on in the Page Designer.

You can't share an application preview URL with your team members. If you want team members to see your changes, you'll need to commit the changes to a branch and then use the Share action to get a URL you can share.

Preview in Debug Mode

When testing your app extension, you typically preview it to see it the way your user would. Sometimes though, you might want to preview the app extension in debug mode to troubleshoot issues with the Visual Builder runtime and Oracle JET libraries—runtime dependencies that make sure your app works as intended.

The Preview option in the header facilitates both modes:

Description of the illustration preview-vbs.png

The default Preview mode uses the optimized variants of the VB runtime and JET libraries. In this mode, all unnecessary characters (such as whitespaces and comments) in the application's source code are removed and variable names shortened to minify code and optimize performance.

The Debug Preview mode, on the other hand, uses the debug variants of the VB runtime and JET libraries. In this mode, line breaks and white spaces are preserved, allowing you to view the application's source code in a more readable format. You can then use your browser's debugging tools to step through your code and figure out exactly where an error occurred.

Because no performance optimization is done in debug mode, previewing an app in this mode can be misleading about how quickly—or slowly—an app opens. As a result, you might want to use debug mode only in a development environment.

• To view your app like a user would with the pages and data displayed, click .
• To view your app in debug mode, click the Preview drop-down, select Debug Preview, then click .

Share Your Application Extension

Application previews can only be seen by you in your workspace, but you can use the Share action to share your application extension with others. The Share action generates a URL for the application extension that you can share with your team members.

If you made changes to the app extension that involved changes to the data model, when you share the URL you might need to also share the name of the sandbox so your team members can check the changes in the app extension using the correct data model. The URL of the application extension you are sharing might not be the same as the URL you see when you are previewing the application extension in the Designer.

To share your edited application extension:

1. Open your workspace in the Designer.
2. If you are using a sandbox, confirm that your current sandbox is the one you want to share.
3. Open the User Menu and click Share.
   
   

   
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4. Click Copy to copy the generated URL for the application extension.

   If you are using a sandbox, you will need to share the URL and the name of the sandbox with your team members.

5. Click Share.
6. Send an email with the generated URL, and include the name of the sandbox if one was used.

Export Your Workspace as an Archive

If you need to share your code for your app extension with a co-worker, you can export your workspace as an archive. Your co-worker can then create a new workspace and import the archive to create a new Git repository containing your files.

When you export an app extension, the exported archive contains the files in your workspace's branch of the app extension's Git repository.

To export an app extension as an archive:

1. In VB Studio's left navigator, click Workspaces.
2. Locate the workspace that you want to export, then select Export Application Extension in the workspace's options menu.