In APEX 4.x it was a little bit cumbersome to use new Plug-ins in an application when you followed the best practice to subscribe Plug-ins from a Master Application which contained all Plug-ins of your workspace. Having such a Master Application has the advantage that you just have to update a Plug-in once when a new version is released. After the import of the new version the ‘Push’ mechanism of subscriptions is used to update all applications using that Plug-in.

In Oracle APEX 5.0 you do now have the new option As a Copy of an Existing Plug-in when you create a new Plug-in. This works similar to other shared components which do support subscriptions. You pick the Master Application and you are presented with a list of Plug-ins which are contained in that application.

With the select list of the Copy? column you are able to specify if a Plug-in should just be copied or Copied and Subscribed. That’s the option you will want to use most of the time and it’s also the default in the wizard.

By calling the Create Plug-in wizard just once, you can copy as many Plug-ins into your application as you want to use. Especially if you have many of them, this wizard enhancement will be a huge time safer compared to APEX 4.x.