Working with Sandboxes

This topic provides an overview of the concept of sandboxes and how they are used within the Intake Form Designer, and it describes sandbox usage and behavior.

Most modern development environments typically require several different individuals to work simultaneously on application changes while sharing the same data model and configuration starting point. The Intake Form Designer utilizes the Oracle Fusion Applications technology referred to as sandboxes to enable form developers to work on projects simultaneously, save their work, and test their forms without affecting other members of the implementation team in the environment.

The sandbox acts as the development and test mode of your application form. During sandbox mode, the form design can be viewed only internally by application developers or business analysts. In sandbox mode you can create your form, add required form elements, add UI elements, and test your changes. When you have completed all of your design, development, and test work, you can then publish the form so it can be migrated to other environments and be accessed by public users.

Note: Creating and modifying transaction types and intake forms should be completed on your development environment or your test environment. After making changes, publishing, and testing transaction types and intake forms on your development or test system, you would then migrate the new and modified definitions to your production system. Refer to the Functional Setup Manager documentation for information on migrating data from the test system to the production system, as well as Managing Transaction Type Configurations.

Types of Sandboxes

Oracle Fusion Applications provides these types of sandboxes:

Classic sandboxes
Unified sandboxes

Classic sandboxes are the default sandboxes that are enabled out-of-the-box and always stay enabled. During implementation, ensure that unified sandboxes are enabled.

Note: To create intake forms, the unified sandboxes feature must be enabled.

For Oracle Permitting and Licensing offerings, unified sandboxes are an opt in feature that you enable in Functional Setup Manager. It is required to have unified sandboxes on your development and/or test environment (depending on the number of pods you have licensed). Do not enable unified sandboxes on your production environment. Unified sandboxes are utilized during development and configuration work, which should not be taking place on your production environment. If the unified sandboxes feature is enabled on your production environment, it can lead to unexpected results, especially during the migration of data from a source environment to the target production environment.

For more information on sandboxes, see the Oracle Applications Cloud documentation: Overview of Sandboxes in the Configuring and Extending Applications guide.

Starting a Sandbox Instance for a New Application Form

Before you can create an application form in Intake Form Designer, you must first create the transaction type. For example, for the permit offering, the transaction type is a permit. When you save a permit type, the application creates a sandbox instance. From that point, the transaction type and the associated form design exist within the newly created sandbox instance.

Each form your implementation team is currently developing exists within its own, separate sandbox instance.

Until you publish the form, the transaction type and the form design remain in the sandbox instance. When you publish a transaction type, the system eliminates its sandbox instance.

Starting a Sandbox Instance for a Published Intake Form

After an application form has been published, you can initiate sandbox instances to make any required changes discovered after the initial publication.

To initiate a sandbox for a published form:

Open the transaction type for the form.
Select Design Form.
Begin making the desired changes.
Click Save.
By clicking Save, the Intake Form Designer creates a new sandbox instance to store the current changes.

Viewing the Sandbox Status

You can determine if a form is in sandbox mode using the Status indicator located in the top left-hand corner of the Intake Form Designer. The Status indicator appears when you are creating the form or previewing the form. The sandbox status does not appear on the published version of the form.

Status	Description
draft	The form is in sandbox mode. All changes exist in the sandbox instance only.
published	The form design is complete and is not in sandbox mode. When a form is published it can be migrated to other environments.

Managing Sandboxes

Use the Manage Design drop-down list to select one of the following actions for the current sandbox.

Page Element	Description
Publish	Select when your initial testing and design work is complete and you no longer require the use of the development sandbox. The sandbox is deleted and the form design is set to a state of published. Form designs in the published state can’t be modified until they are back in the draft state inside of a different sandbox instance. A form design that is published can be migrated from the source environment to the target environment.
Refresh	Select to synchronize the current sandbox with current system data. Sandboxes share common elements, such as field groups, reusable fields, and other system metadata. If those common elements are updated, sometimes that requires the sandbox to be refreshed so that it is synchronized with current system metadata to enable successful saving or publishing.
Revert to Last Published	Select to remove all current changes and modifications and return the form design to the state of the most recent successful publish. Use this option when you are making changes that you no longer need and you’d like to return to the previous published state or you have encountered an issue with the sandbox. Note: When selecting Revert to Last Published, newly added references from your form design to objects stored outside the development sandbox, including lookup types, help text, and rich text area content, will not be reverted. These objects exist outside of your draft form design and you may need to update references to these objects or recreate them, as needed.
Manage Sandbox (FA)	Select to go to the Sandboxes page in Oracle Fusion Applications to view details about the sandbox or update it manually. The sandbox naming convention is: <Transaction Type Code>__sb_<number of publications>. For example, if for a permit, the Type Code value is REMODEL, and the sandbox has been published twice previously, the sandbox for that permit is named REMODEL__sb_2. For information on managing sandboxes using the Sandboxes page, refer to the Fusion Applications Common sandbox documentation.