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APEX 5.0 Interactive Report Customization

Published Tuesday, May 12, 2015 by John Snyders

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

Published Tuesday, May 5, 2015 by John Snyders

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

Published Friday, May 1, 2015 by John Snyders

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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APEX 5.0 Page Designer: Meet the Widgets

Published Wednesday, April 29, 2015 by John Snyders

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

Published Wednesday, April 15, 2015 by John Snyders

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

Published Tuesday, April 14, 2015 by John Snyders

[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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Survey Builder Design

Published Monday, July 22, 2013 by John Snyders

One 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.

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