With Visual Builder Studio the lifecycle of the application's code is managed separately from that of data that is stored in business objects. In this blog we'll show you how to hook up data management into the process that deploys your application. Managing the data lifecycle can be done using the new Visual Application build steps that were added to Visual Builder Studio. Note that this demo is a continuation of the previous blog that shows the initial configuration of a package and deploy steps.
The data manager in Visual Builder helps you get data in and out of business objects while developing the app. We'll use the Visual Builder Data Manager "Export all Data" option to generate a zip file with base data we can use in our dev/test app. This will create a zip file with csv files with the data for each business object.
In Visual Builder Studio, we create a separate Git repository to store this file, as it is not part of your application code. Then we are going to load the exported file into that repository.
To automate populating business objects we create a new build job that uses the Import Data step from the Visual Application category. Note that the application we are importing into in the video is published with a version in the path ("Include the application version in the URL" is checked) - which means this is not a "live" app as the URL will change when we modify the app version. We can therefor import data into it directly.
Applications that don't have the "Include the application version in the URL" checked are your "live/production" apps - with a fixed URL that won't change when you deploy new versions. If you want to do a similar import of data into a live/production app, then you need to first use the Lock step to lock the app, then import the data, and then Unlock the app.
Note that the options also include an Export Data - which you can use to first export data from the current instance of the app, then do the deploy step, and then import the data back in.
Here are the base steps: