Press "Enter" to skip to content

HardLikeSoftware Posts

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

Continue readingHow to hack APEX Interactive Grid Part 1
Comments closed

Interactive Grid column widths

Published Friday, January 6, 2017 by John Snyders

Since the first Early Adopter release of APEX 5.1 I have seen a number of questions or complaints about how column widths are handled in Interactive Grid. I think the complaints may be based on misunderstandings of how things work. I hope to explain here everything you need to know about column widths in Interactive Grids. Still, I’m not 100% sure that in implementing Interactive Grid we got it all exactly right. You can let me know in the comments after reading this.

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

Continue readingInteractive Grid column widths
8 Comments

Passing Data in and out of APEX Dialogs

Published Thursday, January 5, 2017 by John Snyders

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]

Continue readingPassing Data in and out of APEX Dialogs
6 Comments

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.

Continue readingInteractive Grid: Under the Hood
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.

Continue readingHow to identify Survey Builder respondent
Comments closed

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.

Continue readingAPEX Interactive Report Checkbox Row Selection
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.

Custom Menu Demo

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.

Continue readingAPEX 5.0 Custom Menus
1 Comment

APEX 5.0 Dialogs

Published Friday, May 22, 2015 by John Snyders

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.

Continue readingAPEX 5.0 Dialogs
2 Comments