Create and Edit VB Studio Custom Backends for Visual Applications

Backends define the servers that your visual applications and extensions can access, allowing you to keep information about commonly used servers in one place. In the context of visual applications, the VB Studio catalog of predefined services can include several backends, such as Oracle Cloud Applications and Integration Applications, depending on the tenant-level settings of your environment's Visual Builder instance. If these backends don't meet your needs, you can use the Environments page to access the environment's catalog and create a custom backend.

After you create an environment and add a Visual Builder instance to it, click Backends on the Environments page's Service Instances tab to load the catalog editor for that specific environment:

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An environment's catalog editor performs essentially the same function as the Tenant Settings->Services tab does for a Visual Builder instance:

Description of the illustration admin-settings-process.png

For example, using the Services tab, suppose you've configured a backend called ORDS on the VB instance where you plan to deploy your visual applications. This backend immediately becomes accessible to all visual applications deployed to or created on this instance, without having to define it explicitly within the application itself. A VB Studio environment's catalog editor allows you to achieve the exact same thing. That is, after you've defined the ORDS backend for a given environment, it automatically becomes available to all visual application workspaces that are based on that environment.

Note:

Backends that you add using VB Studio's catalog editor are not propagated to the Visual Builder instance named in the environment. You'll need to use the Tenant Settings Services tab for each target Visual Builder instance to configure the backends explicitly.

You can use an environment's catalog editor to modify existing custom backends or create a new one to access services that aren't predefined for you in the default catalog. For each backend, you can use these tabs to view and edit the backend's details:

Tab	Description
Overview	Displays the name and type of the backend. Use the topmost + button to create a new backend or use the lower + button to create a child backend.
Servers	Displays the servers associated with the backend and includes the instance URL associated with the instance. From here you can add, edit, or remove backend servers. You can have only one server for a backend in the environment's catalog editor. (This mirrors the same restriction for servers and backends in the Visual Builder's runtime instance's tenant settings: you can have only one server per backend.) For each server, you can define: Headers Security and connection details
Headers	Displays the static headers defined for the backend at the server level. You can add and edit headers in the tab.
Source	Displays the description of the backend stored in the environment-level catalog.json file. If you override the environment-level definition, this file shows the contents of the application-level catalog from the services/catalog.json file. You can edit the entries in the Source tab, if you want.

Note:

If your visual applications consume Integration Applications or Oracle Cloud Applications backends, you don't need to configure or edit them using the environment's catalog editor. These particular backends are autocreated for you when you select them from Add Service Instances, which you access by clicking + Add Instance on the Environment page.

See What Are Backends? to learn more about backends.

To learn more about adding an Oracle Cloud Application instance to a visual application, or creating a backend, custom backend, or child backend, see Manage Backends in Your Visual Application.

To learn more about selecting authentication and connection types for backends, see Configure Authentication and Connection Types for Service Connections and Backends.