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Month: April 2015

APEX 5.0 Page Designer: Meet the Widgets

One of the primary things I worked on for APEX 5.0 is Page Designer. There have been a number of presentations and blog posts about what it is, how to use it, and how it increases productivity. What I want to talk about here is what Page Designer is made of. Page Designer was a huge undertaking and a number of people had their hands in it. I’ll focus on the parts I know best; the widgets.

If you are asking yourself, “Could my APEX application have pages as complex as Page Designer?”, the answer is Yes. The level of effort and skill needed is going to depend on what you are trying to achieve. The point is that Page Designer is not taking advantage of hidden or private APEX engine features. This doesn’t mean that all the building blocks of Page Designer are available for use in your applications but that the facilities are there for you to create and integrate your own building blocks. Knowing a little about the architecture of Page Designer may inspire you to create complex, highly dynamic and interactive pages in your applications.

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APEX and Asynchronous Ajax

I rarely read the release notes because I’m in a hurry to get to the good stuff. APEX 5.0 has plenty of good stuff to get to but I want to call your attention to one release note in particular: “Deprecated Synchronous Ajax in Dynamic Actions”

Earlier this year there was an interesting thread on the APEX forums titled Synchronous requests deprecated. It points out that some browsers are now giving warnings (if you have the console open) when synchronous ajax requests are made and, more importantly, that APEX apps that use dynamic actions with Wait For Result set to Yes will make a synchronous request.

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APEX 5.0 Icon List widget

[As of this writing, APEX 5.0 is only available as a pre-production version installed on apex.oracle.com and might change until it gets released.]

There are so many new things in APEX 5.0 that it is difficult to decide where to start. So, for no particular reason, I’ll start with the icon list widget, which is something that I worked on. The first place you will most likely run into the icon list widget is in Page Designer. Edit any page and at the bottom of the Grid Layout tab you will see a gallery of Regions, Items, and Buttons. At first glance it looks like an ordinary list of images somewhat like the Badge or Cards list templates in Universal Theme. But there are important behavioral differences mainly around accessibility.

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