Introduction

Visual Builder Studio (“VBS”) helps you to rapidly create and extend applications using a visual development environment with integrated agile and collaborative development, version control, and continuous delivery automation.

VBS is included as part of the SaaS (Software as a Service) license and built into Oracle Fusion SaaS environment. VBS is the recommended option for customizing and extending user interfaces on top of Fusion SaaS data.

Oracle Visual Builder Studio ("VB Studio") is a robust application development platform that helps your team effectively plan and manage your work throughout all stages of the app dev lifecycle: design, build, test, and deploy. You can get additional details from the A-Team blog provides the differences between VBS and Visual Builder Cloud Service (“VBCS”)

In continuation to my blog “Best Practices for Configuring and Extending Fusion Applications Cloud”, this blog will provide you with a high-level overview of extending and presenting data from Fusion cloud applications pillars seamlessly to the business user using Visual Builder Studio.

Oracle’s Fusion SaaS cloud applications bring consistent processes and a single source of truth across the most important business functions—from enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, and human capital management to advertising and customer experience. Fusion cloud applications is a connected applications suite that is the foundation for synergies of unified data.

Use Cases

Fusion cloud application users often need data from multiple pillars. As the Fusion Cloud application contains data across pillars in a single unified data model, business users can leverage back-office and front-office data together to make timely decisions. With Visual Builder Studio, organizations can quickly configure and extend to get the enterprise data view for business users. The most common cross-pillar use cases for Oracle Fusion Applications Suite are:

• Customer orders and outstanding invoices can be viewed by the sales user.
• The buyer user can find out whether the supplier is also a customer and see additional information about the customer.
• The ERP user wants to understand the customer by looking at the opportunities.
• Create a 360-degree view of a customer that includes data from sales, ERP, and SCM!
• Create Data Intelligence extensions user interface (Simple UI for identifying if the same organization is a customer, supplier, or prospect, Quick summary of multiple objects together, identifying exceptions, data issues)
• Using multiple Fusion cloud applications REST APIs, present forecasting data for users to create a transaction.
• Build a simple screen that captures data once, then populates them using REST APIs.
• Use VB Studio to leverage custom objects for application extensions.
• Create new pages and embed in your Fusion applications.
• Modify Oracle-created existing pages, to show/hide content, modify, create additional calculated fields, and add new content.

The use cases mentioned above are sample use cases only. If you require data warehousing and an analytical view of your enterprise data with a prebuilt reporting solution refer to Oracle Fusion Analytics.

Solution

Until last year, Oracle customers leveraged Platform as a Service (“PaaS”) for extending Oracle Fusion Cloud applications leveraging Oracle Visual Builder Cloud Service (“VBCS”). You may refer to the series of A-Team blogs What should you know when extending SaaS with Visual Builder Cloud Service?

Now, Oracle VB Studio gives you the power to customize Oracle Cloud Applications to suit your company’s specific business needs. Your test environment is automatically provisioned with an instance of Visual Builder Studio per cloud account by default. Refer to the documentation on how to set up VB Studio to extend Oracle Cloud Applications documentation. New application extensions can be created using any available REST API within Fusion cloud applications.

An App UI is simply an application that includes a user interface component in the form of Visual Builder pages and flows. Some App UIs are created by Oracle—like certain Oracle Cloud Applications—but you can build your App UIs and deploy them as peers alongside Oracle’s App UIs in your Oracle Cloud Applications ecosystem. Refer to Extending Oracle Cloud Applications with Visual Builder Studio documentation for details.

Extensions are what you use to deliver new capabilities into Oracle Cloud Applications.

Key features of VB Studio

• Integrated Collaborative DevOps lifecycle (Plan, code, build, test, release, deploy)
• Visual development platform for JavaScript/HTML/REST based applications.
• Faster to develop using drag and drop to configure and create code.
• Easier to maintain by visualizing the logic.
• Faster development leveraging pre-populated service catalog and project templates.
• Complete team collaboration and CI/CD platform.
• Git integration
• Packaging and deployment automation

Sample application extension

Sample requirement

An Organization implementing multiple pillars on the Global Single Instance (“GSI”), one of the requirements is business users need to know whether the same organization is also a supplier in Procurement, a Prospect/Customer in CX, and a Customer in ERP for making decisions. In addition, they also wanted to view data from ERP such as customer accounts and invoices.

Suggested approach

High level suggested approach is given below. You can alter it based on your requirements.

All the REST APIs used for this sample requirement is given below:

The VB APP UI screenshots built using VB Studio below displays the list of organization records and user can get additional details.The calculated attribute Address (concatenated fields City, State, Country) and derived attributes (CX Customer, ERP Customer, Supplier) based on the usages from hubOrganizations REST using simple JavaScript. 

For a selected Organization (ERP Customer=”Yes”), displays the details of customer account, and receivable invoices from ERP, and all the opportunities from CX.

Configuration required in VB for adding to FA navigator.

• Make sure you check the boxes as shown below on the main page and flows.
• You can add permissions to control access to your App UI, as well as individual flows and pages in the App UI.
• Refer to documentation for details

VB deployment and rendering within FA

• After deploying in VB Studio, you will be able to see your “Display name of VB App” under ”Others” tab.
• If the entry appears in lower case letter, you may need to fix it.
• You should remove the entries before re-deploying in VB.
• When clicked from FA, the VB page will be rendered, you can add security if needed.

Hope the above sample approach will help you in planning your custom extensions using VB Studio.

Guidelines

• Verify access to VB Studio from Oracle Fusion Cloud applications is provisioned and enabled on your TEST POD by default. One VBS instance will be provisioned per cloud account.
• You must deploy visual builder applications to a standalone instance of Visual Builder if you want to use this instance of Visual Builder Studio to create visual applications (new custom applications) rather than application extensions, this is an entirely separate product that may require a separate license.
• Analyze your requirements and plan whether you can configure and extend all your use cases using natively provisioned VBS within your Fusion Cloud Applications, or do you need standalone VBS or VBCS? Refer to the A-Team blog to understand the differences between VBS and Visual Builder Cloud Service (“VBCS”).
• You can deploy your application extension to any of your environments (test or production).
• You can only modify pages that were created with VB and set to be customizable.
• Custom objects created using Application Composer can be used within the VB Studio application extensions.
• Publishing the sandbox before merging your application extension changes can help avoid potential problems resulting from using two different data models. The application extension changes are then automatically deployed to a test environment.

References

Note: Refer to the most recent documentation at all times.

• Extending Oracle Cloud Applications with Visual Builder Studio
• Get Started with Visual Builder Studio
• Oracle Cloud Apps Extensions - The New APP UI approach
• The New Visual Builder Studio - Introduction for Visual Builder Developers
• Managing Development Lifecycle for Visual Applications using VB Studio
• VB Cookbook

Summary

Oracle Fusion applications cloud provides you with VB Studio provisioned as a default option for extending and creating business-friendly applications. By designing, developing, and deploying application extensions with VB Studio, you'll provide your users with the best experience. I hope this blog helps you plan your application extensions. Finally, I want to thank Karthick Saravanan, Oracle Consulting for his contribution and support.