The business objects that you create in Visual Builder Cloud Service (VBCS) are quite powerful. Not only can they store data, manage relationships, and give you a rich REST interface for interacting with them, they can also execute dedicated business logic that deals with the data.
If you click on the Business Rules section of a business object you'll see that you can create:
- Triggers - allow you to react to data events such as insert, update, and delete on records.
- Object and field Validators - allowing you to make sure that data at the field or record level is correct.
- Object Functions - A way to define "service methods" that encapsulate logic related to a business object. These functions can be invoked from various points in your application, and also from outside your app.
To code logic in any of these location you will leverage the Groovy language.
I wanted to show the power of some of the functionality you can achieve with these hook points for logic. The demo scenario below is based on a requirement we got from a customer to be able to send an email with the details of all the children records that belong to a specific master record. Imagine a scenario where we have travel requests associated with specific airlines. When we go to delete an airline we want to send an email that will notify someoe about the travel requests that are going to be impacted by this change.
To achieve this I used an accessor - an object that helps you traverse relationships between the two objects - to loop over the records and collect them.
In the video below you'll see a couple of important points:
- Business object relationship and how to locate the name of an accessor
- Using a Trigger Event to send an email
- Passing an object function as a parameter to an email template
- Coding groovy in a business object
For those interested the specific Groovy code I used is:
def children = TravelRequests; // Accessor name to child collection def ret_val = "List of travel requests "; if (!children.hasNext()) { return "no impact"; } while (children.hasNext()) { def emprec = children.next(); def name = emprec.name; ret_val=ret_val+" " +name; } return ret_val;
By the way - if, like me, you come from a background of using Oracle ADF Business Components you might find many of the things we did here quite familiar. That's because we are leveraging Oracle ADF Business Components in this layer of Visual Builder Cloud Service. So looking up old Groovy tutorial and blogs about ADF BC might prove to be useful here too :-)