Best of 2024: Preparing to Extend Oracle Fusion Apps Using Visual Builder Studio

Oracle University Podcast

What do you need to start customizing the next generation of Oracle Fusion Apps? How do you create new pages for business processes? What level of expertise do you require for this? Join Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham as they get answers to all these questions and more from Senior Principal OCI Instructor Joe Greenwald. Survey: https://customersurveys.oracle.com/ords/surveys/t/oracle-university-gtm/survey?k=focus-group-2-link-share-5 Develop Fusion Applications Using Visual Builder Studio: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/develop-fusion-applications-using-visual-builder-studio/138392/ Build Visual Applications Using Oracle Visual Builder Studio: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/build-visual-applications-using-oracle-visual-builder-studio/137749/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. -------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript:

00:00

Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started.

00:26

Lois: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I’m Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Team Lead of Editorial Services.

Nikita: Hi there! You’re listening to our Best of 2024 series, where over the next few weeks, we’ll be revisiting four of our most popular episodes of the year.

Lois: Today’s episode is #2 of 4, and we’re throwing it back to another episode with our friend and Senior Principal OCI Instructor Joe Greenwald. This episode is all about extending Oracle Cloud Applications that are being built using Visual Builder for the front-end.

01:04

Nikita: Right, Lois. We began by asking Joe to explain what’s happening with the redesign and re-architecture of Oracle Cloud Applications using Visual Builder Studio, or VBS.

Joe: That’s right, Niki. Oracle is redesigning and rebuilding its entire suite of Fusion Cloud Applications, over 330 different products, utilizing over 60,000 engineers — that is “60,” not “16”—at Oracle to develop the next generation of Oracle Fusion Applications. What’s most exciting is that the same tools the engineers are using to accomplish this are available to our partners and our customers to use to extend the functionality and capabilities of Fusion Applications to meet their custom needs and processes.

01:45

Lois: That’s pretty awesome! We want to use this time today to ask you about extensions, the types of extensions you can create, and how to use Visual Builder Studio to create those extensions.

Nikita: Yeah, can we start with you telling us what an extension is? I’ve gotten the sense that Oracle uses the term extension as both a noun and a verb and that’s a bit confusing to me. Joe: Yeah, good catch, Niki. Yes, Oracle does use the term extension in two ways: both as a noun and a verb. As a noun, an extension is a container for the code changes that you make to your applications. Basically, it’s a Git repository that Oracle creates and manages for you. So, the extension container holds the code changes you make to your page layouts: the fields, their positioning, showing and hiding fields, that sort of thing, as well as page functionality. These code changes you make are stored in the extension and it is this extension with your code changes that is merged with the main Git branch eventually and then deployed using continuous integration/continuous deployment jobs defined in Visual Builder Studio, which manages the project and its assets. Your extension is a Git branch that is an asset of the project. Once your extension code is merged with the main branch and deployed, then the next time someone brings up the application, they’ll see the changes you’ve made in the app.

02:59

Lois: And as a verb?

Joe: As a verb, extension means to extend the functionality and the look and feel of the application, though I prefer the term customization or configuration to describe this aspect, as the documentation does, and to avoid confusion, though I’ll admit I’m not always consistent about the terms I use.

03:16

Lois: What types of customizations, or extensions, and I’m using the verb now, are available for Fusion Apps in Visual Builder Studio?

Joe: There are three different ways Fusion Apps can be customized effectively, configured, or extended. The first way is what we call a basic extension, where you’re rearranging hiding, or showing, or moving around fields and sections on the page that have been set up to be extendable by the Fusion Application development teams. Things like hiding fields, showing fields, hiding sections, showing sections…

03:45

Nikita: So fairly basic actions…

Joe: Yeah exactly and they can be done in Visual Builder Studio Designer by people with minimal VB training, Visual Builder training. And, most recently, if you have access to it, you can do it in the new Express mode, where the page shows you just those things you can work with and just the tools you need to work with the page. This is new and makes it much easier for folks who are not highly technical to make basic changes to the page layout.

04:09

Lois: People like me! That sounds easy enough.

Joe: And the next type of extension is more of an intermediate change and requires some training with Visual Builder Studio because you’re creating rules that govern the display of layouts based on certain conditions on the page. These are highly flexible, powerful, and useful for creating customized page layouts based on a variety of factors from page size and orientation to the role of the person using it to values in the actual fields on the page itself. These rules can be combined to create complex rule-based conditions that display exactly what the user should see, given the conditions of the page and their role. I would also include making changes to action chains, which execute sequences of behaviors and navigation, and the actual structure of the application, but this is more advanced. Lastly, is creating mashup applications, which are stand-alone Visual Builder visual applications, which use data from Fusion apps, and customer data sources, like their own database tables, and potentially third-party APIs to create brand new pages and applications with new functionality, new processes, new procedures, new displays, all of which look just like Fusion Applications and use the same data as Fusion applications.

05:18

Lois: Joe, how do I get started if I want to extend a page?

Joe: The easiest way to do it is to open a page in Fusion Applications and then select Edit Page in Visual Builder Studio from the Profile menu. You’re then prompted for a project to hold the Git repository for the extension container. And since there’s probably already one that exists, after you select the project, an extension Git container is assigned to you. Unless this is the very first time the application has been extended in which case it creates an extension for you. When creating customizations or configurations, we recommend that each application be done in its own separate project. So, for example, if you’re working on Customer Experience Sales, you might do it in Project A and if you’re working on extensions with HCM, you might do it in Project B. And if you decide to create your own pages and flows in your own app, you might do that in Project C.

06:04

Nikita: But why do you need to do this?

Joe: That’s just to keep things nice and separate and organized. The tool, Visual Builder Studio, doesn’t really care, but it makes for cleaner development and can help with the management of the development teams.

06:14

Nikita: Ok, Joe, I have a question. How do I know if the page I’m on in Fusion Apps can be edited in Visual Builder? I know there are a lot of legacy pages still out there and they can co-exist with the new VB-based pages.

Joe: If the URL of the page you’re on has the word /Redwood in it instead of /faces, then you know this is a page that was created using Visual Builder Studio and you’ll be able to extend it and make changes to it using the Edit in Visual Builder Studio option. So, if you select Edit in Visual Builder Studio, then the page you are on opens inside Visual Builder Studio Designer and you can make changes to any part of the page that has been explicitly enabled for extension by the development team.

06:53

Lois: That’s an important part, right? The application is not extendable by default.

Joe: That’s right, Lois. It is all locked down and you can’t make any changes to it by default. The development team must specifically enable certain parts of the page: sections, fields, layouts, variables, types, action chains, etc. as extendable for you to be able to make changes to it.

This ensures the changes the development team makes to the application in the future won’t break your extensions. And conversely, the development team can choose to not extend portions that they do not want you to touch or mess with. Then if they do change that bit of the app in the future, it won’t break the application and you won’t get a big surprise.

So, using the Edit page in Visual Builder Studio, you can make both basic changes, like moving, showing, and hiding fields and sections, as well as the more intermediate types of configurations, like using dynamic components to create rule-based layouts that change dynamically based on several conditions such as page size, roles of the user, and field values on the page itself.

07:51

Nikita: What happens if two developers make changes and essentially overwrite each other’s customizations — say one hides a field and another later exposes it?

Joe: Well, whoever commits their changes and deploys last wins. The other developer’s changes get overwritten. So, this is something the team would want to consider carefully. It is possible to roll back to an earlier version if one must. And this can be done in Visual Builder Studio — the part that manages project assets like Git repositories. And there are Oracle blog posts about how to do that if you’re interested in learning more.

08:20

Lois: Joe, earlier you mentioned creating new pages and flows, but so far you’ve only talked about modifying existing extendable pages. How do I create new pages and flows?

Joe: In a Visual Builder extension, a set of pages and flows is called an App UI. When I use the terms pages and flows, what I’m talking about is a set of pages that are logically related—whatever logical means to the designer and developer—in a group called a flow that you can navigate between. But you can also navigate between flows and even between applications. So, without getting too technical, each application has a default flow, which has a default page where that flow starts when the app first comes up. So, you can think of an App UI as a collection of flows and their pages, and a URL that accesses the default flow and its default page. That’s the page you would see first when accessing that URL. Of course, this can be configured and changed by the developer, as needed.

Now, when Oracle creates the original application (for example, digital sales, helpdesk, or something like that), we create an App UI, which contains the pages and flows for that application and is the “entry point” into the app, accessing that App UI’s default flow and its default page and then things flow on from there. Partners and customers can create their own application extensions that are dependent on an Oracle application and even create their own App UI – their own sets of pages and flows to accommodate their own processing and workflow needs. This gives them the ability to add their own processes and rules, and still leverage and navigate to the core application that Oracle built.

For example, say Oracle delivered digital sales as an Oracle Cloud Application built using Visual Builder to a customer and the customer needs to add a few pages to do some validation or other type of business processing before entering the digital sales application. What the customer does, in this case, is create a new extension of the Oracle Digital Sales app and an App UI of their own, which would be the set of pages and flows that contain the processing they want to start with before then navigating into the digital sales app to use Oracle’s application.

10:22

Nikita: Wait, did I hear that correctly? We’re creating an extension of an extension or creating an extension on an existing extension?

Joe: I know, right? I realize this can sound confusing the first time you hear it or the second time or even the third time. It took me a while to get my head around what they’re talking about. Let’s start with a Fusion application. In a Fusion application, everything is an extension of something. This is just how the code base and the architecture are organized and how they manage the Git repositories and the code base itself.

So, Oracle created a base application called the Unified App. The Unified Application contains the basic page structure and common functionality needed for all applications. For example, it contains the header at the top that has the profile and the footer at the bottom of the page that has that little Ask Oracle icon. Within that page, between the header and the footer, are the pages that are created by the developers, whether they be Oracle engineers or partners or customers. They display the contents of the page with the data and the layouts and all of that.

In a sense, you can think of the Unified App as an index page, the starting page of the web application. Though that’s not completely true technically, it’s good enough for illustrative purposes. So, Oracle starts with the Unified App and then a development team extends that Unified App to build their product. This is how digital sales did it. This is how customer experience did it. This is how helpdesk did it. They start with the Unified App and they extend that and create an App UI that contains the flows and pages for their specific application, and then add functionality for all the pages and flows, as needed for the design.

Partners and customers can then create a new extension that extends the Oracle Application and add their own App UI and their own URL if they want their pages accessed first, before navigating to the Oracle application. For example, if the digital sales application has functionality you’d like to leverage, like it has data services or fragments or page layouts that you want to reuse or other things, you extend the digital sales application, and this extension holds your code changes. You could then create a new App UI, and once deployed, users can use that URL for the new App UI to access your new pages. And your page can then navigate to the Oracle app when it needs to. Though I will say to date, we’re really not seeing much demand for this particular use case, but it is possible.

12:33

Lois: Is that the only option available to customers and partners—to extend an existing Oracle application? Joe: No, Lois. We’re seeing customers and partners create brand new Fusion applications of their own, based on the Unified App Oracle created. In a sense, doing the same thing that our development teams here are doing.

Remember, I said an Oracle development team starts with the Unified App, which has common functionality and look and feel for all applications, and then extends that to add business rules processing, flows, App UI, whatever they need for their specific Oracle application.

We’re seeing our partners and customers wanting to build their own applications. Maybe a customer or partner wants to create a Time & Expense application and leverage the Fusion application data and the APIs available, but define their own flows, their own pages, their own processing. This is very easy to do. They’d start by extending the Unified App just like the Oracle development teams do, and then build their own App UI and within that, their own flows, pages, and custom processing. The nice thing about it is that the application looks and works and feels just like a Fusion application and it appears alongside other Fusion applications, because it is a Fusion application.

13:43

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14:24

Nikita: Welcome back! So Joe, it sounds like there are two different paths or life cycles to create extensions for future applications in Visual Builder Studio. Is that correct?

Joe: Yes, exactly. So one path to extending the functionality of Fusion apps is to edit the page in Visual Builder Studio, which opens the page in Visual Builder Designer, and you then make changes to the existing pages, depending on what the development team has made extendable.

14:49

Nikita: But you can’t create new pages and flows in this scenario, right?

Joe: This is strictly about modifying an existing page. The other path is creating a new application extension, which is a new application from scratch or extending an existing Oracle application or even an existing partner or customer application. Again, we’re not seeing this typically being done too much. Most partners and customers create new applications or make customizations to existing pages. But the architecture does support it. So, your partner might create a new application based on the production app released by Oracle, and you could extend their application. Or a development team at your site could extend Oracle’s application and you could then extend that team’s application. This is mechanically possible, although I question the use case behind that. Usually, we see our apps being extended – becoming a dependency when there’s code that can be leveraged or reused for a new app and its new App UI.

15:40

Lois: Joe, what did you mean when you say one extension is a dependency of another? Can you talk a bit about dependencies, what that means, how it looks to the developer?

Joe: When you extend an application, it becomes a dependency to your application, and you get access to all the resources within that dependency that are marked as extendable by the developer who created that extension. Most useful are things like service connections to REST APIs from Fusion apps data sources, reusable code fragments, and layouts that you can leverage in those cases where you want to create a new App UI. When an extension is listed as a dependency, you’ll see this graphically in Visual Builder Studio Designer. When you see an extension listed as a dependency, it means you can reference any of that extension’s resources that have been marked extendable by the developer. Recall all resources are closed off or hidden by default, but development teams can mark resources as open to being extended and reused, and then you can see and use those resources. So, you can easily add and remove extensions as dependencies in Visual Builder Designer as needed. Now, this can be a nice way to modularize and reuse your resources and assets. To summarize: I can modify an existing page – this is most common, extend an existing application and create a new App UI, which is not common, or I can extend the unified app to create a new app and a new App UI and add other extensions as dependences, as needed, to leverage their services, fragments, and layouts when building my own pages – this is pretty common as well.

17:04

Nikita: There’s one thing I’d like to come back to, Joe. You mentioned something called a mashup application earlier. Can you tell us a little more about that?

Joe: To recap: I mentioned a couple of different ways that you can extend Fusion applications. One is changing layouts or creating rule-based layouts. You can also extend existing apps and create your own App UI on top of them or create your own Fusion app from scratch. But these are Fusion apps and they have restrictions.

These can only run within the Fusion applications ecosystem, which means they can only be accessed by people who are registered in the Fusion application ecosystem, and there are some other restrictions (for example, in terms of the APIs you can access). And you also have no access to customer data tables.

Mashup applications use the stand-alone Visual Builder Cloud Service, which enables you to create custom visual applications. These are visual applications that run outside the Fusion apps ecosystem. Users only need to be identified to the Identity Cloud Service, IDCS, and then they can get access to these mashup apps, depending on the roles and privileges given to them, of course. These mashup applications can access Fusion apps API data, as well as customer database tables, Excel spreadsheet data, CSV files, and third-party APIs. And all this data can appear on the same page, in the same app, using the same Redwood components, so they look and work just like Fusion applications.

18:22

Lois: I know in the past there’s been some friction to making changes in Fusion applications. Partner and customer developers use different tools than the ones Oracle engineers use and there have been some deployment issues. To wrap up things, can you tell us why customers should use Visual Builder Studio to customize Fusion apps?

Joe: Glad to, Lois. The big benefit to customers is that they are using the exact same tools, Visual Builder Designer for page design work and Visual Builder Studio for project and code management, to build the customizations and extensions that Oracle is using to create the applications and extensions that are delivered to them.

I can’t emphasize enough how big a deal this is and how wonderful it is for the customer. We’re constantly making the Visual Builder Designer interface easier and easier to work with. We’re currently releasing a new version of Visual Builder Designer—the Express mode version. This version of Designer is lightweight and has only the necessary features required to allow you to make changes to pages and layouts, and create and manage dynamic rule-based layouts. If you need more (for example, you need to create service connections, fragments, and do a lot more of that type of advanced work), then use the advanced version of the Designer. Both are available to you, assuming that your user has the appropriate permission and the Fusion app you are using has implemented Express Designer.

19:37

Lois: OK Joe, what courses does Oracle University offer for me if I wanted to learn more about developing extensions for Fusion apps and creating mashup apps using Visual Builder Studio?

Joe: Oracle University has several courses. We have the Develop Visual Applications Using Visual Builder Studio, which focuses on creating the stand-alone custom bespoke mashup visual applications.

We also have our Design and Develop Redwood Applications course, which goes into detail about working with the Redwood page templates and components. All these courses are free and available today. And all you need to do is log in to mylearn.oracle.com to get started.

20:10

Nikita: We hope you enjoyed that conversation. Just a quick reminder before we close about the short survey we’ve put together to get your thoughts on the podcast. It’ll take just a few minutes and will help us make the podcast even better. Just click the link in the show notes to participate. Join us next week for another throwback episode. Until then, this is Nikita Abraham...

Lois: And Lois Houston, signing off!

20:33

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