Understand Your Oracle Sales Customization and Integration Environment

You can extend Oracle Sales using various integration methods and tools. As part of your planning process, familiarize yourself with the tools and best practices for developing an integration.

Roles Required for Customizing Oracle Sales

Before you perform any customization task, you must have a role which provides access privileges to the necessary integration tools.

Use the following table to find the roles that provide access to the integration tools that you need. You can customize the roles in Oracle Sales. Note that if you have both the Sales Administrator and Application Developer roles, you have access to all of the integration tools.

Integration Tools	Roles
Application Composer	Master Data Management Application Administrator Customer Relationship Management Application Administrator Application Implementation Consultant Sales Administrator Product Data Steward Contract Setup Contract Setup Custom
Page Integration wizard	Application Administrator Sales Administrator
Third-party applications	Customer Relationship Management Application Administrator Application Implementation Consultant Sales Administrator
RESTful API	Application Developer Application Implementation Consultant Application Administrator Human Capital Management Integration Specialist (Recommended)

About Working in an Oracle Sales Sandbox

A sandbox provides an isolated environment where you can implement your Oracle Sales customizations safely. This sandbox helps to minimize disruptions to users and to preserve application integrity before you deploy new custom functionality.

Sandboxes also make it possible for multiple users to implement and test customizations at the same time without affecting each other’s work. For example, as a developer, you may be modifying an Oracle Sales object to invoke a web service that is running on Oracle WebLogic Server for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. However, you may not want your changes to become available to other developers or end users until you’ve finished your integration work.

Whenever you plan to extend Oracle Sales, it’s important that you clearly define how sandboxes should be used and the workflow for managing your work using sandboxes, to safely manage your customization work.

Considerations When Using Sandboxes

Consider these best practices when using sandboxes.

• Make sure that you fully understand your company’s specific policies regarding the use of sandboxes.
• While multiple users can work concurrently in the same active sandbox, you must avoid a situation where overlaps may exist; for example, when multiple individuals try to work on the same object.
• Perform all customizations in a staging (test) instance of your environment.
• Adhere to your company’s process for publishing customizations that were developed in a sandbox.

About the Workflow for Using a Sandbox

Manage your sandboxes with the Manage Sandboxes tool.

The Manage Sandboxes interface is the main tool for controlling how sandboxes are used. To access this interface, click your user name in the upper right hand corner of the home page, select Administration, and then Manage Sandboxes.

The following recommendations and best practices can help you make the most of working in sandboxes:

• Create one sandbox for testing (which will never be published) and one for integration (where you can test and validate against all other customizations prior to publishing).
• Only one sandbox can be active at a time.
• Keep in mind that Oracle CX Sales and Oracle Human Resources do not support a standard mechanism for rolling back changes that have been published from a sandbox to the mainline code.
• After publishing the work implemented in a sandbox, the next round of customization work should be done in a newly created set of test and integration sandboxes.

In terms of carrying out your customizations in a sandbox, the following sandbox management operations are available:

• Create: Available from the Manage Sandboxes interface by clicking Actions and then New .
• Activate: A sandbox becomes active after you select it in the Manage Sandboxes interface and click the Set as Active button.
• Exit: To deactivate a sandbox, click the sandbox name at the top of any page, and then click Exit Sandbox in the dialog.
• Publish: Customizations that have been completed in a test-only sandbox should be replicated to an integration sandbox and if all validations pass, the customizations can be published from the integration sandbox to the mainline code.
• Delete: Available in the Manage Sandboxes interface by clicking Actions and then Delete. You can only delete non-published sandboxes that are inactive.

About the Application Composer Utility in Oracle Sales

Application Composer is a bundle of web-based tools that let certain types of users extend Oracle Sales to facilitate integrations with external applications, including PaaS-based solutions like Oracle WebLogic Server for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

With Application Composer, you can implement a wide range of customization and integration tasks that span much of the functionality and data in the Oracle Sales environment. However, when it comes to PaaS-SaaS integration, the key focus areas include:

• Object model customizations: You can create custom objects and modify the properties and functionality of both standard and custom objects along with the workflows and relationships among them. In addition, you can enhance object functionality through web services integration.
• User interface customizations: You can customize the properties and extend the functionality of fields, buttons, and links on a standard page. Also, you can duplicate pages so that you can then extend the functionality of the original.
• Scripting customizations: You can use Groovy scripting to apply conditional and other programming logic to different application components. This includes invoking third party applications and web services.

These focus areas are not mutually exclusive, so some customizations might overlap all three categories.

The Application Composer is a design-time tool that is available at runtime. Most interface changes take effect immediately, without your having to log out and back in. However, data model changes, such as the creation of custom fields, require that you re-authenticate before the changes become available.

For most customization and integration work that uses Oracle Sales Application Composer, you have to activate a sandbox.

Access the Application Composer in Oracle Sales

Learn how to access the Application Composer in Oracle Sales.

Before you begin, make sure you have sufficient privileges to access the Application Composer. To access the Application Composer:

1. Activate a sandbox.
2. From your application home page, click the Navigator menu, and under the Tools category, click Application Composer.
3. In the left-hand pane, verify that the Objects and Common Setup nodes are active.