The writings of John Snyders, mostly about software.
How to pass data into and return data from an APEX dialog is something that comes up from time to time on the APEX forum. I have not seen a comprehensive treatment of this topic so decided to work up an example of the various possibilities.
[Updated 23-May-2017 to reflect 5.1.1 and add detail for when dialogs are opened from navigation menu list]
[Updated 9-Jul-2019 with information about security settings to be aware of]
In the beginning (or soon after) there was Component View. Then in APEX 5.0 we added Page Designer but left Component View around because it…
Comments closed[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 CommentsThis post contains statements about possible future functionality. These are not official statements. They are speculative, subject to change, and should not be relied upon.…
Comments closedIt 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 closedIn 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 CommentsThe 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:
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 CommentsThis 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.
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 CommentAs a developer I love how easy it is to create dialogs with APEX 5.0. But as a user I get a little annoyed that I have to move and resize them each time I open a dialog. Today I’ll show how to persist dialog position and size for the duration of a browser session.
2 CommentsMy 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.
2 CommentsThis 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.
3 Comments