Visual Builder can work with any REST service as a source of data, but it provides additional built-in features for services exposed by Oracle Cloud Application (Oracle SaaS). Visual Builder is familiar with the specific syntax those services use for advance functionality such as query by example, sorting, pagination, drilling into related items and other capabilities they support. However some VB developers might miss these capabilities and treat Oracle SaaS services like any "regular" service. In this blog I show how to take advantage of the special capabilities by using the "Define by Specification" option in Visual Builder.
Most of the services exposed from Oracle Cloud Applications are built on top of the Oracle ADF framework, and leverage the built-in features that this framework offers. One of those features is a detailed set of meta-data about each object. To get to the metadata you simply add "/describe" to the end of the URL for the object you want to access. This is explained in the "Access Metadata" part of the Oracle SaaS documentation around REST service.
In Visual Builder when you are adding a service, you have the option to define a service based on specification, using either the OpenAPI/Swagger spec or using the ADF Describe spec. So when you are working with Oracle Cloud Applications services, you should take advantage of this capability. In addition to allowing you to define multiple operations/endpoints on the object in a single step, you'll get declarative ability to specify things like filtering, sorting, and paginations/limits parameters - saving you from the need to specify transform options.
An additional note, if you are building an app that access Oracle Cloud Applications, you should setup the application's services connection to point to your Oracle SaaS instance, and then you'll be able to choose objects directly from the catalog, as shown in the first minute of the demo video.
For seamless experience, don't forget to also setup single-sign-on between VB and SaaS, and configure your SaaS for CORS situations.