What Are Service Connections?

A service connection provides basic information about a service, including connection details, properties, and the REST endpoints provided by the service.

You can create a service connection by:

• Selecting a service from a catalog of preconfigured Oracle SaaS/PaaS REST services
• Providing a Swagger or ADF-Describe specification that describes the external service
• Providing the location of a REST endpoint for the external service

Each of these mechanisms create a representation (metadata) of the external REST service, which is required for you to use the REST endpoints as data sources in your extension.

Let’s take a look at how you might use service connections in your extension:

• Let’s say you’re configuring an Oracle-provided App UI, which has a dynamic container, and you want some of the content in the container to be sourced from a new custom object you defined in Oracle Cloud Applications. You create a service connection in your current extension, choose the Catalog option, select the relevant Oracle Cloud Application pillar, then select the custom object REST endpoint you want to use. Finally, after you’ve created and tested the service connection, you use it to source the content in your dynamic container.
• Suppose you’re creating a brand new App UI which needs to show population data from a publicly-available countries API. In the extension containing your new App UI, you’d create a backend (with no authentication), as well as a service connection to the countries API. You’d then configure the UI elements on the App UI’s page to show data from this service connection.
• Suppose you want to display data from a third-party system, like LinkedIn, in your App UI. To achieve this, you’d first create a backend to represent LinkedIn, using a local server configuration that uses the OAuth 2.0 Client Credentials for the authentication method. Next, you’d create a service connection to the LinkedIn REST API, using the "Define an Endpoint" option. Finally, for each Oracle Cloud Application instance to which you plan to deploy your extension, you’d need to configure the Manage Backend for Visual Builder Studio page, as described in Connect to OCI Process Automation Services.
• Suppose you want to create a companion application (that is, an App UI) for your HelpDesk app, which relies on a custom object you created in Application Composer. You could simply grab the URL for the REST Describe in Application Composer, then create a new service connection using the Define by Specification option in VB Studio. See Display SaaS Data In Your App UI for more details.
• Instead of creating a new service connection, you might add an extension containing the service connection you want to use as a dependency, assuming that the "accessible" flag has been set. You could also use any of the service connections or backends defined in the Unified Application.

When you define a service connection, you supply metadata for it that can include request and response payload structures in JSON, query and path parameters, headers, and so on. This metadata helps to shape the raw data that you get back from the REST call, to narrow the scope of the data that is returned.

When you create a new service connection, you must also create a new backend, unless you use an existing backend as part of the service connection. Backends provide a way to bundle common attributes across service connections into a single entity you can refer to later. For example, you could create a backend (perhaps called “myBackend”) with the URL and the authentication information, then create two service connections based on “myBackend” for /employee and /department resources.