Tag: APEX

APEX Client-Side Validation

Published Wednesday, May 10, 2017 by John Snyders

There is a new little known sorta feature in APEX 5.1 called client-side validation. You may have missed it because it is not listed in the release notes under new features and only mentioned cryptically, almost tangentially, in the release notes section “Compatibility Mode Changes in Mode 5.1”. It says

“… buttons where the Execute Validations attribute is set to Yes also perform some client-side validations (such as item required checks) and will not submit the page until all issues are fixed”

Other hints and evidence for this feature are the new apex.page.validate function, the validate option to apex.page namespace submit and confirm functions, and the new apex.item getValidity and getValidationMessage functions.

1 Comment

Add Checkbox Selection to APEX Tree Region

Published Wednesday, April 12, 2017 by John Snyders

Hopefully you have already converted to the APEX Tree implementation. This is important because the deprecated jsTree implementation will be removed in the next release of APEX so that we can update jQuery and Oracle JET libraries to the latest versions. Some people are still using the jsTree implementation because they have custom code to do things such as checkbox selection. Questions about how to do this and other things with the APEX Tree have come up many times on the APEX forums.

This article will describe how to add multiple selection with checkboxes to the APEX tree region. You can try it out here. You can also download the app. It is a 5.1.1 app but this technique should work in 5.0 as well.

2 Comments

How to hack APEX Interactive Grid Part 4

Published Friday, March 31, 2017 by John Snyders

In this fourth and final part of the series I’ll cover events and working with the data model. I’ll assume you have read parts 1, 2, and 3 and have at least intermediate level experience with APEX and JavaScript. A very important point is that the information in this article applies to APEX version 5.1.1. Some things may work in 5.1 but I’m not going to bother distinguishing which. Anyone programming Interactive Grid should move to 5.1.1 as soon as possible.

9 Comments

APEX Interactive Grid API Improvements in 5.1.1

Published Tuesday, March 28, 2017 by John Snyders

Normally there isn’t too much excitement around a patch set release but if you are programming Interactive Grid (IG) then APEX 5.1.1 is a big deal. A number of improvements were made to IG and its component parts that make it easier to configure and control from JavaScript and in some cases make possible things that weren’t possible before. Even if you are using IG without client side custom code you will be interested in 5.1.1 for the 31 bugs that have been fixed. IG will continue to get better and 5.1.1 is a good next step.

2 Comments

How to hack APEX Interactive Grid Part 3

Published Monday, February 20, 2017 by John Snyders

If you haven’t read parts one and two yet you probably should before proceeding with this one. They covered some basics, configuration and toolbar and menu customization. In part 3 I’ll explain how to control and interact with Interactive Grid (IG) using JavaScript. As was already mentioned in parts 1 and 2 this is aimed at people with at least intermediate level experience with APEX and JavaScript Also most of the APIs are not documented or supported.

[Update 5.1.1 28-Mar-2017] This article has been updated to reflect patch release 5.1.1

10 Comments

How to hack APEX Interactive Grid Part 1

Published Wednesday, January 18, 2017 by John Snyders

It is nice to see from the questions rolling in on the APEX forums that people are trying to do interesting and advanced things with Interactive Grid (IG). I’m happy to answer questions about how to do things programmatically with IG but in this 3 4 part series I hope to give you some tools, tips and examples to figure things out on your own. This blog series assumes at least intermediate level experience with APEX and JavaScript.

[Update 5.1.1 30-Mar-2017] This article has been updated to reflect patch release 5.1.1

Comments closed

Interactive Grid: Under the Hood

Published Wednesday, June 8, 2016 by John Snyders

[This article is about a beta release of APEX 5.1 known as Early Adopter 1 so the details are subject to change]

[UPDATE Jan-2017 APEX 5.1 was released. Don’t use the Early Adopter link. You can now try it out at apex.oracle.com. I made a few updates to this article as marked]

One of the major and eagerly awaited features of APEX 5.1 is Interactive Grid; an editable data table supporting master-detail and much more. You can learn about Interactive Grid by signing up for a workspace at the Early Adopter site, installing the Sample Interactive Grids application, running it and trying out each example. Be sure to read the overview section of each page. I expect in the coming weeks there will be tutorials and other information from a number of people about the features of Interactive Grid and how to use it in various ways. But here I want to talk about its internal architecture.

Why is it important to know about the internal architecture of Interactive Grid? Its not. To use a car analogy most people don’t care to know how their car works. What matters is that it gets them from point A to point B and possibly looks good as well. But some people like to know a little about how the car works, what’s under the hood, even if they never intend to service or build a car themselves. This article is for those who like to know how things work, and I expect there are a fair number of them in the APEX development community.

6 Comments

How to identify Survey Builder respondent

Published Monday, December 7, 2015 by John Snyders

It has been a while since I have worked on the APEX Survey Builder packaged application but I still get questions about it. One question that comes up repeatedly is how to associate the questionnaire responses with the person that responded. At first this question surprised me somewhat because survey research is about populations not individuals so surveys should be anonymous. To quote Designing an Effective Survey by Mark Kasunic:

“A survey, when conducted properly, allows you to generalize about the beliefs and opinions of many people by studying a subset of them”

Survey research lets you say with confidence “87% of our customers feel that the produce makes them more productive” not that John Snyders thinks he is more productive after using the product.

Comments closed

APEX Item Submission

Published Thursday, July 30, 2015 by John Snyders

In his 3 part series ending with APEX and the Order Items are Submitted, Martin D’Souza did a great job explaining how APEX page items…

2 Comments

APEX Interactive Report Checkbox Row Selection

Published Friday, July 24, 2015 by John Snyders

The question of how to add checkboxes to interactive reports comes up often. Usually the problem is not getting the checkbox to display in a row but in how to do something useful with the checked state. There are many forum or blog posts on this topic but they all seem to be rather dated. Even when the general idea is still applicable they use outdated practices including:

Inline event handlers using onchange or onclick attributes. These should be dynamic actions.
HTML regions with script tags in them or script tags in the HTML Header page attribute. There are much better ways to get JavaScript on a page now. Consider JavaScript File URLs, Function and Global Variable Declaration, and Execute when Page Loads attributes as well as dynamic actions.
Making ajax requests using the htmldb_Get API. This should be replaced with dynamic actions or apex.server.process API calls.

So I thought I would take a stab at solving this problem.

8 Comments

APEX 5.0 Custom Menus

Published Monday, July 13, 2015 by John Snyders

This topic has been motivated by a few different APEX forum threads as well as direct questions from teammates. Here I will show how to add a menu button to each row of an interactive report that will open a menu and the menu item actions will be specific to the row.

The above pictured Custom Menu Demo is available to try out and to download. This article assumes some familiarity with APEX and JavaScript.

Simple Popup Menu

Before going into how to create a custom menu let me make sure that we all know how to create a simple list based popup menu.

1 Comment

Survey Builder Design

Published Monday, July 22, 2013 by John Snyders

One of my first projects after joining the APEX team was creating the Survey Builder packaged application (available in Oracle Application Express 4.2.2). This was my first experience creating an APEX app. A number of people helped out on the implementation (especially on reports) and also helped me learn APEX. I worked on the overall design and functionality and focused on implementing the questionnaire page and questionnaire editing page, both of which required lots of JavaScript. The paper Designing an Effective Survey by Mark Kasunic provided invaluable background information on the survey process and I recommend it to anyone new to conducting survey research.

Survey Builder is a little different from typical APEX apps (if there even is such a thing as a typical APEX app). Here I want to describe a couple of requirements that shaped its design and the resulting APEX implementation. A great thing about APEX is that it comes with a number of fully functional packaged applications such as Survey Builder that you can use as-is, tweak to do what you want or just open up to see how it works. So feel free to install Survey Builder, unlock it, and follow along.

Comments closed