A Quick Introduction to Oracle Integration:

Integration is a fundamental part of your digital business development. It involves connecting on premises applications and cloud applications and services. Oracle Integration makes it easy to connect your applications and automate end to end processes such as procure to pay, inquiry to order, and hire to retire.

With Oracle Integration, you can:
Develop integrations to design, monitor, and manage connections between your applications.

Create process applications to automate and manage your business work flows.

Analyze results to gain insight into your business

Build custom web and mobile applications

Critical business processes, such as those related to human capital management (HCM), customer experience (CX), and enterprise resource planning (ERP), are frequently slow and inflexible. For example, a multi step process such as Lead to Opportunity to Quote to Order can involve four or more applications and require human exception management at every step of the process. In this scenario, the lack of integration between departments as well as the delays caused by human based problem resolution can result in lost revenue, frustrated customers, and high costs.

Oracle Integration changes all that. It empowers you to:

Establish connectivity between the many applications and people that are part of the entire business process life cycle.

Assemble existing technologies into new business services to better align with the changing pace of new business demands.

Deliver new business innovations faster by rapidly connecting diverse applications and key business roles.

Gain 360 degree views across your entire business. Easily monitor and analyze every application, integration, and workflow spanning the business process life cycle.

About Integrations

Oracle Integration is a complete, secure, but lightweight integration solution that enables you to connect your applications in the cloud. It simplifies connectivity between your applications and connects both your applications that live in the cloud and your applications that still live on premises. Oracle Integration provides secure, enterprise grade connectivity regardless of the applications you are connecting or where they reside.

Oracle Integration provides native connectivity to Oracle Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, such as Oracle Engagement Cloud Adapter, Oracle B2C Service, and so on. Oracle Integration adapters simplify connectivity by handling the underlying complexities of connecting to applications using industry wide best practices. You only need to create a connection that provides minimal connectivity information for each system. Oracle Integration lookups map the different codes or terms used by the applications you are integrating to describe similar items (such as country or gender codes). Finally, the visual data mapper enables you to quickly create direct mappings between the trigger and invoke data structures. From the mapper, you can also access lookup tables and use standard XPath functions to map data between your applications.

Once you integrate your applications and activate the integrations to the runtime environment, the dashboard displays information about the running integrations so you can monitor the status and processing statistics for each integration. The dashboard measures and tracks the performance of your transactions by capturing and reporting key information, such as throughput, the number of messages processed successfully, and the number of messages that failed processing. You can also manage business identifiers that track fields in messages and manage errors by integrations, connections, or specific integration instances.

Who this course is for:
Beginners in Oracle Integration
Enthusiasts in learning Oracle Integration
If you are a Mulesoft, WebMethods, Boomi or any other integration developer or a consultant and eager to learn Oracle Integration then this course is designed for you to learn from scratch
If you are a fresher and want to learn Integration in Oracle Integration (OIC) to get a dream job in OIC
Professionals who want to learn OIC Integration to take up new assignments in Oracle Integration
NOTE: This course does not contain source code for all classes. You may have to follow along with the classes as per instructions and practice.

Get Started with Visual Builder

To use Oracle Visual Builder you should be familiar with the tools available for building your applications.

About Oracle Visual Builder

Oracle Visual Builder is a visual and declarative cloud environment for developing and hosting engaging mobile and web applications.

Visual Development Experience

It provides simple but powerful visual development tools to create responsive web and mobile apps all without the need to install any additional software. This rich set of visual tools help you quickly design your app by dragging and dropping UI components and customizing their attributes to define behavior. While these tools lend themselves to low code developers, experienced developers can just as easily access the underlying source code, even extend it using standard HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS techniques for complex needs.

Easy Access to Data

Visual Builder makes it easy to access your apps data through REST based services. So you can create reusable business objects to implement your apps business logic and store its data, which can then be managed through REST endpoints that Visual Builder generates for you. Or you can pick data objects exposed by Oracle SaaS or Oracle Integration applications in an integrated catalog of REST services. You can also access data from any external REST service with just a few clicks.

Development and Hosting Platform

Visual Builder is a complete development tool as well as a hosting platform, which means you can manage your applications lifecycle right from development to test and final publishing. Version management and data migration are built into an apps lifecycle, making it easy for you to stage and publish your app and manage its data in every phase.

What is more, Visual Builder is a managed service. This means that once you provision a Visual Builder instance, there is very little you need to do beyond developing and publishing your app. Everything the app needs to run successfully (including a web server to host your application and to secure data access) is taken care of. Thus, as a development team, you can take your app from development to stage and publish it in a very short time.

Your Visual Builder instance provides capabilities for your visual application both as a visual development tool (at the top) as well as an app hosting platform with a built in web server (indicated by server side components at the bottom):

As a visual development tool, Visual Builder provides access to UI components and WYSIWYG interfaces that leverage the open source Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit (JET). This visual environment, known as the Designer, features several visual editors that a development team can use to collaboratively build rich UIs that span multiple devices. It also supports Redwood, the Oracle standard for user experience, that lets you develop apps that provide the same look and feel as apps delivered from Oracle.

Within this environment, you can develop browser based responsive web and mobile apps. You can create progressive web apps, which combine the on device mobile experience with a web apps ease of distribution eliminating the need to download updates from app stores.

As an app hosting platform, Visual Builder provides various capabilities to publish and run your app in the cloud, including an embedded database that stores your apps business objects essentially Oracle tables with business logic exposed through REST APIs and their data.

It also includes a REST proxy service to manage access to external REST endpoints. When your apps data comes from REST APIs in Oracle catalogs such as Oracle SaaS or Oracle Integration, the proxy service uses server side integration with the Oracle Identity Cloud Service (IDCS) to manage authentication and authorization (by default) through identity propagation. When your app’s data comes from other REST endpoints, authenticated REST mechanisms are used to manage credentials.

Together, these components provide the resources required to host your visual app and manage its data.

When your apps are published, they become available to your users in the cloud, from any desktop or mobile device, with communication to the apps underlying JET components secured over HTTPS and REST.

How to Begin with Oracle Visual Builder Subscriptions

Here is a summary of the key steps to help Oracle Cloud account administrators get started with Oracle Visual Builder:

Sign up for a free credit promotion or purchase a subscription. See Request and Manage Free Oracle Cloud Promotions or Buy an Oracle Cloud Subscription in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Documentation.

Sign in to your Cloud Account. See Access Oracle Visual Builder.

Create accounts for your users and assign them appropriate privileges and roles. See Managing Users, User Accounts, and Roles in Managing and Monitoring Oracle Cloud.

Access Oracle Visual Builder

To develop applications using Oracle Visual Builder, you access the service through a web console.

To access Oracle Visual Builder:

Sign in to your Oracle Cloud Account using your user name and password. See Signing In for the First Time in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Documentation.

For more information about sign in options, see Understanding the Sign In Options.

Enter your identity domain and user credentials. Click Sign In.

Anatomy of Visual Applications

To develop applications with Oracle Visual Builder, you need to understand a few basic concepts.

The basic components of a visual application are mobile applications, web applications, service connections, business objects, and processes. The basic building blocks of a mobile or web application are user interface (UI) components, variables, action chains, page flows and page navigation, and data access through REST endpoints.

The building blocks and their interactions can be summarized as follows.

Variables are the mechanism used to store and manage client state. Every variable has a type and a scope.

An action chain is composed of a set of one or more individual actions. The action chain is triggered by an event. (For example, a button click can trigger navigation to a page.) Each action represents a single asynchronous unit of work. An action chain can define input parameters and local variables that are available only in the context of that action chain, and can also access application scoped input parameters and variables.

Page flows and page navigation govern the transmission of information from one page to another. Each individual page has a lifecycle, as does an application. Each lifecycle event (entry or exit from a page, for example) can provide a trigger for an action chain.

A UI component encapsulates a unit of user interface through a defined contract  specifically, the Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit (JET) components contract. Component attributes are bound to variables, and component events and variable changes trigger action chains.

All data entering a mobile or web application is based on REST. This data can come from business objects and service connections. Actions and variables control how data is sent to and from a REST endpoint in a mobile or web application. A developer can create a type that matches the REST payload and pass the data using a variable of that type.

Variables and Lifecycles

Application and page variables are constructed automatically in a specific application or page lifecycle stage.

Input parameters that are passed by means of navigation rules, or bookmarkable variables that are provided on the URL, are automatically assigned to their corresponding variables. When you modify the value of a bookmarkable variable, the URL is automatically adjusted to match that new value (that is, a new history state is pushed). In this way the page is always bookmarkable and does not require any specific user action in order to be bookmarked.

Variables and Events

A variable triggers an onvaluechanged event when it is modified. This event is triggered only when the value is actually changed; setting a variable value to the same value does not trigger an event. The variable must be explicitly changed to send the event. For example, if a variable is a complex type, modifying an inner property does not fire this event; the entire variable must be set by means of an API call. In this case, the framework can add to the payload those parts of the structure that have changed. For example, if you changed the name property of an Employee and then reset the Employee, the framework would send an event that the Employee changed, and as part of the payload indicate that the name has changed.

An onValueChanged event can trigger a user defined action chain. The trigger has the payload of the former and new values of the variable.

For more information, see Understanding Actions and Action Chains.

Understand Actions and Action Chains

An action chain is made up of one or more individual actions, each of which represents a single asynchronous unit of work. Action chains are triggered by events.

An action chain, like a variable, has a scope: it can be defined at the application level or the page level. You can call an application scoped action chain from any page. You can call a page scoped action chain only from the page on which it is defined.

To create an action chain, you can define your own actions and can also use predefined actions. Actions within a particular chain run serially, and multiple action chains can run concurrently. Action chains simplify the coordination of asynchronous activities.

A single event may simultaneously trigger multiple action chains. For example, the page enter event may trigger multiple data fetch action chains simultaneously.

An action is a specific function that performs a task. In JavaScript terms, an action is a Promise factory. An action can exist only within an action chain, not independently.

Action Chain Context and Contract

Action chains have a well defined context and contract: an action chain orchestrates its underlying actions, coordinating state flow and the execution path. The action chain can define input parameters and local variables that are only available in that context. An example of an action chain is one that makes a REST call (first action), then takes the result of that and stores that in a variable (second action).

An action chain maintains its own context, which is accessible through an implicit object called $chain. Actions may export new state to that context, but it is only available to future actions along that same action chain. An action chain can be created in the context of a page or the application and exists within the scope of the page or the application. It has a defined interface and contract and can be called by event triggers using its ID.

The action chain contract has three parts.

Action Chain PartDescriptionIDString identifier for the action chainInput parametersZero or more variables that can be passed into the action chain and added to the action chain contextVariablesZero or more variables that are internal to the action chain and usable internally by actions

For more information, see Action Chains in the Oracle Visual Builder Page Model Reference.

Built in Actions

Visual Builder comes with a set of built in (or predefined) actions for an action chain, used for example navigation or assigning variable values. An action has the following parts that the developer can define:

Action PartDescriptionIDString identifier for this action instance. This action part is optional, since the ID is necessary only if you wish to refer to the actions results later in the action chain.ConfigurationAny properties of the action that the user can configure. For example, for the Navigate action, the page to navigate to and any parameters required for that navigation.Outcomes and ResultsAn action may have multiple potential outcomes (such as success or failure, or a branch). It can also return results.Exported StateAn action may export state that is available to future actions within the context of the same action chain.

The predefined actions include conditionals and other processing instructions. For example, you can use if and switch actions that take an expression and offer multiple different chain continuations depending on the result.

For details about predefined actions, see Actions in the Oracle Visual Builder Page Model Reference.

Event Handling for Action Chains

Action chains are defined at the application or page level and triggered by a specific event, such as onValueChange (for a variable), or vbEnter. An event may include a payload, which can then be used within the action chain. A payload may be passed into an action chain through the input parameters. The Visual Builder user interface can help you create action chains automatically (with appropriate input parameters) based on a particular event.

Who this course is for:
Beginner Oracle Visual Builder (VBCS) developer

Overview

You can use Oracle BI Publisher, the pixel perfect reporting solution for authoring, managing, and delivering all your highly formatted documents, such as operational reports, electronic funds transfer documents, government PDF forms, shipping labels, checks, sales and marketing letters.

What Is a Data Model?

A data model is an object that contains a set of instructions to retrieve and structure data for a pixel perfect report. Data models reside as separate objects in the catalog.

A data model can be simple with one data set retrieved from a single data source (for example, the data returned from the columns in the employees table) or can be complex with parameters, triggers, and bursting definitions and using multiple data sets.

Use the data model editor to build a data model.

Components of a Data Model

A data model supports the following components:

Data set

A data set contains the logic to retrieve data from a single data source. A data set can retrieve data from a variety of data sources (for example, a database, an existing data file, a Web service call to another application, or a URL/URI to an external data provider). A data model can have multiple data sets from multiple sources.

Event triggers

A trigger checks for an event. When the event occurs the trigger runs the PL/SQL code associated with it. The data model editor supports before data and after data triggers as well as schedule triggers. Before data and after data triggers consist of a call to execute a set of functions defined in a PL/SQL package stored in an Oracle database. A schedule trigger is executed for scheduled reports and tests for a condition that determines whether or not to run a scheduled report job.

Flexfields

A flexfield is a structure specific to Oracle Applications. The data model editor supports retrieving data from flexfield structures defined in your Oracle Application database tables.

Lists of values

A list of values is a menu of values from which report consumers can select parameter values to pass to the report.

Parameters

A parameter is a variable whose value can be set at runtime. The data model editor supports several parameter types.

Bursting Definitions

Bursting is a process of splitting data into blocks, generating documents for each data block, and delivering the documents to one or more destinations. A single bursting definition provides the instructions for splitting the report data, generating the document, and delivering the output to its specified destinations.

Custom Metadata (for Web Content Servers)

If you have configured a Web content server as a delivery destination and enabled custom metadata, the Custom Metadata component displays in the data model editor. Use this component to map data fields from your data model to the custom metadata fields set up for a set of rules defined in a Content Profile.

Features of the Data Model Editor

Use the data model editor to combine data from multiple data sets from different data sources such as SQL, Excel files, Web services, HTTP feeds, and other applications into a single XML data structure. You can use data sets that are unrelated or establish a relationship between the data sets using a data link.

The data model editor enables you to perform the following tasks:

Link data Define master detail links between data sets to build a hierarchical data model.

Aggregate data Create group level totals and subtotals.

Transform data Modify source data to conform to business terms and reporting requirements.

Create calculations Compute data values that are required for your report that are not available in the underlying data sources.

Overview for Report Designers

A report consists of a data model, a layout, and a set of properties.

Optionally, a report may also include a style template and a set of translations. A report designer performs the following tasks:

Design the layout for the report. The layout can be created using a variety of tools. The output and design requirements of a particular report determine the best layout design tool. Options include the Layout Editor, which is a Web based layout design tool and enables interactive output, Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Excel, and Adobe Flexbuilder.

Set runtime configuration properties for the report.

Design style templates to enhance a consistent look and feel of reports in your enterprise.

Create subtemplates to reuse common functionality across multiple templates.

Enable translations for a report.

About the Layout Types

BI Publisher offers several options for designing layouts for reports.

The layout type determines the types of output documents supported. The following formats are supported.

BI Publisher layout (XPT)

BI Publishers Layout Editor is a Web based design tool for creating layouts. Layouts created with the Layout Editor support interactive viewing as well as the full range of output types supported by RTF layouts.

Rich Text Format (RTF)

BI Publisher provides a plug in utility for Microsoft Word that automates layout design and enables you to connect to BI Publisher to access data and upload templates directly from a Microsoft Word session. The RTF format also supports advanced formatting commands providing the most flexible and powerful of the layout options. RTF templates support a variety of output types.

Portable Document Format (PDF)

PDF templates are used primarily when you must use a predefined form as a layout for a report (for example, a form provided by a government agency). Because many PDF forms already contain form fields, using the PDF form as a template simply requires mapping data elements to the fields that exist on the form. You can also design PDF templates using Adobe Acrobat Professional. PDF templates support only PDF output.

Microsoft Excel (XLS)

Excel templates enable you to map data and define calculations and formatting logic in an Excel workbook. Excel templates support Microsoft Excel (.xls) output only.

XSL Stylesheet

Layouts can also be defined directly in XSL formatting language. Specify whether the layout is for Data (CSV), Data (XML), FO Formatted XML, HTML, Text, or XML transformation.

eText

These are specialized RTF templates used for creating text output for Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) or Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) transactions.

Flash

BI Publishers support for Flash layouts enables you to develop Adobe Flex templates that can be applied to BI Publisher reports to generate interactive Flash output documents.

Who this course is for:
Beginners in Oracle BI Publisher (BIP)
Beginners in Oracle BI Publisher (BIP) curious for Oracle Integration