Hacking the APEX error page!

Do you like the separate APEX error page which is called when APEX raises an error (eg in the MRU/MRD process for tabular forms)? If yes, you don't have to read further, if your answer is NO you may should read the rest of this posting...

Wouldn't it be cool and much user friendlier to have this error message displayed as inline message, as we can do it for validation processes? You thought that's not possible, because when the page is re-rendered, all the changes in the tabular form are lost... It is possible!


Yesterday I had an idea and did a "little" (ok it took a little bit longer, because I'm a newbie in JavaScript :-) ) hacking and finally came up with a solution which you just plug into our application and all error messages which normally displayed in the separate error page are now displayed as inline message, without re-rendering and loosing your entered data.

But first try out the following examples.

Standard Tabular Form example with old error handling

After you have done that, check out my

Enhanced Tabular Form example with inline error messages.

Isn't that cool? :-)

How to integrate it into your application?

Follow the steps in my How to integrate posting.

Vola, that's it! If an error message is displayed now on the APEX error page, the text will be extracted and pasted into the caller page.

See also

Hacking APEX error page - part 2

I'm new to JavaScript programming, so if you see "some errors/you don't do that in JavaScript", please let me know. I would appreciate that!

Or if you have any other suggestions or problems, don't hesitate to drop me a note. I haven't done a lot of testing yet, but it seems to work fine with FireFox 2.0 and IE 6.0.

Don't forget to check out the other ApexLib framework solutions!