Oracle APEX Builder Plugin version 1.8 is now available!

Not heard about this plugin yet? It’s a Firefox/Internet Explorer extension to enhance the usability/productivity of the Oracle APEX Builder IDE. It adds

• Resizeable Textareas
• Keyboard shortcuts
• “Set” operations
• Seamless integration of the ApexLib Framework
• and much more!

So what’s new?

Rodney Barnett posted on the OTN Forum a useful suggestion to highlight the “Comment Shortcut” at the top of the page if a comment text has been entered. Most time nothing is entered in the comment, but in the cases someone enters something, nobody will notice. So I thought, until that gets added to the APEX Builder, I’m a little bit quicker than the Oracle guys and here you go! BTW, it automatically filters generated code by wizards.

I also fixed some bugs on some pages (like Link Edit) where the textareas didn’t show up probably anymore after installing v1.7.

What else? I finally was also able to fix the nasty “Problems with “Headings Type” in the Report Attributes” bug which was a wired one. Had to move the “Set” select list on the page, because otherwise this strange bug showed up all the time when the user hit the browser “Back” button.

I also added a “Version check” feature, which will check once a week if a newer plugin version is available. It will send the current plugin version, APEX version and your browser name to an update server which returns the link to the “What’s new page”, if a new version is available. If you want to check the code because of security reasons, have a look at line 1134 (ApexBuilderPlugin.checkNewVersion). Nothing else is sent.

Have fun!

PS: I thought I create this release before the one with the syntax highlighting, because the above bugs where sometimes really show stoppers in my opinion.