Creating Reusable Custom UI Components - Input text with action buttions

 This post gives you access to one of my recent articles published on Oracle blogs.

Creating Reusable Custom UI Components in Oracle VBCS.

https://blogs.oracle.com/vbcs/post/creating-reusable-custom-ui-components

In this article, you will learn how to create a custom component with an example of input text with two action buttons Accept and Cancel. 

This article covers, how to

• create a custom component
• complete actions for the button elements on the UI
• create a custom event and pass the result value to the calling component

Warning: SelectSingle: could not fetch data for selected value

Many times you may see this warning while working in the combination of ADP (ArrayDataProvider) with SingleSelect components in Oracle VBCS or Oracle JET. 

Warning: SelectSingle: could not fetch data for selected value

In this post, we will see how to resolve this.

We get this warning when we input an ADP variable as a data value to a SingleSelect component. 

It will not give any error. However, it may not work as expected many times. 

The reason for this is, for the ADP properties, if the Data is set to "Assign Data Later", then the "Item Type" should not be blank. It is expected to bind to a "Type". Hence, define a type for the objects of ADP holdings and assign the type here. 

Difference between Array Data Provider and Service Data Provider in Oracle VBCS

 In this post, we will learn the difference between data providers available in Oracle VBCS.

A data provider is to hold a collection of data from the backend that can be bound to collection components such as listView and table on UI. In VBCS, we have two types of data providers, which are ArrayDataProvider and ServiceDataProvider.  We will see the difference between these two.

ArrayDataProvider :

• This is a static data provider which means it is a static source of data that does not change frequently
• This only allows infrequent adds, updates, and removes of the data
• In some cases, the UI component bound to this data provider needs to be refreshed after the data in its variable changes
• Operations on the data such as sorts, adds, removes or updates are managed by this data provider itself

Service Data Provider:

• This data provider represents the data that fetches from a service endpoint
• It allows externalizing fetches through an action chain
• Unlike ArrayDataProvider, this is a dynamic data provider that updates its variables and UI when the data changes through the delegated action chain
• Variable that uses this type also can be bound to collection components like listView, table, select and other components that accept the data provider. 
• This has in-built support for operations like sorting, filtering, and paging of data collection

When there will be more custom operations required to apply to the data, we should go with ArrayDataProvider as it will be static. When the data updates frequently and no major customization is required for the data, then we should choose ServiceDataProvider, especially in cases like pagination and lazy loading.

Oracle Visual Builder Cloud Service: Testing the application with multiple user security roles

In this post, we will see how to test an application by changing the required user roles.

While developing an application in Oracle VBCS, we may need to test some features of the application with a specific user role and other features with a different user role.

To achieve this, we may need multiple user logins which have required roles individually.

However, while developing an application, we have a feature in VBCS to change the roles dynamically at application run time and test.

This feature is very much useful because it reduces the number of logins and skips the navigations in the application development phase.

In this post, we will see the various options available in VBCS to achieve this.

Option 1: We can have a login page and authorize the application based on logged-in users' roles.

Option 2: 

• Go to application settings
• Go to the "User Roles" tab. All the roles will be listed if available to the app. Also, we can create new roles. Below is the screenshot for your reference.

• We can add the users or groups to the roles by clicking on the "Assign groups and users" role listed in the tab. Please check the below screenshots for your reference.

• Click on the "Save Changes" button
• Note, the application should be staged after this change.

Option 3: 

• Go to the "Page designer" of any page of the application
• View the page in "Design" mode
• Click on the icon as shown on the below screen

• Select/de-select the roles required and run the app

For more details on securing the VBCS application, you can visit the documentation here.