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.
2 CommentsHardLikeSoftware Posts
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.
3 CommentsToday I’ll show you how to add keyboard shortcuts to your APEX 5.0 application so that pressing a key combination will navigate to a specific page. For example you could have Ctrl+Alt+D bring you to your “dashboard” page from any other page in your app.
1 CommentI 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.
The last two years or so I have been very busy working on APEX 5.0. This is the main reason for not posting anything in…
Comments closedOne 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 closedThis past Sunday I gave a talk at the ODTUG Kscope conference in New Orleans titled Implementing RESTful Web Services with Oracle Application Express. The…
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