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Month: May 2015

APEX 5.0 Dialogs

My guess is that if asked what APEX 5 UI feature is the most complex, most people would say Page Designer. It is true that Page Designer is big, as in a lot of code, but it is also very modular and you can understand each part and then how they work together. Another good guess would be Universal Theme because it is very broad in scope, has fancy CSS that must work cross browser and some nifty behaviors such as collapsible side bars and sticky headers. However, given the title of this article, it should be no surprise that in my opinion the most complex UI feature of APEX 5 is the modal dialog page. Here is why.

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APEX 5.0 Interactive Report Customization

The improvement to Interactive Reports in APEX 5.0 has gotten mixed responses. Many people are very happy with the improvements, which include: multiple interactive reports per page, fixed headings, improved looks, improved usability, improved markup, and new features such as pivot.

However, people that had previously customized their apps by leveraging internal unsupported functions of Interactive Reports are lamenting the loss of the gReport variable that enabled those customizations.

The improvements in 5.0 and any future improvements necessitated restructuring the code to isolate the internal details. What was left out is an API to the useful features that people had discovered and shared. As Anthony mentioned on the OTN forums this is something that we hope to rectify in the future. The rest of this article is for the curious and impatient.

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Right-to-left Support in APEX 5.0

This post contains statements about possible future functionality. These are not official statements. They are speculative, subject to change, and should not be relied upon.

Right-to-left direction support (RTL) was not a stated goal or feature for APEX 5.0. That hasn’t stopped a number of people from asking about it; why no RTL support?, how do I create an app using RTL direction? For someone building an APEX app in a right-to-left language the Universal Theme doesn’t seem very universal.

Although RTL is not a 5.0 feature it doesn’t mean we completely ignored the issue. Here I will describe and demo what can be done today and hint at future possibilities. It isn’t a ready to use solution but should help get you started. We intend to improve RTL support over time including some out of the box capabilities in Universal Theme in a future patch release. Think of what I demo here as a progress report.

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APEX 5.0 Converting to the new APEX Tree

Today I’ll show step by step how to convert from the old APEX tree region, which used the third party jsTree library, to the new APEX 5.0 tree implementation. As I previously mentioned the tree region now uses the same JavaScript tree view widget that is used in Page Designer by default. But if you have an old application that is using the tree region it will continue to use the old jsTree region after upgrading to 5.0.

The reason that the tree region couldn’t be automatically switched to the new tree during upgrade is because of differences in how the implementations use icons/images and complex ways in which customers have customized it with JavaScript by calling jsTree APIs.

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