Oracle APEX Page Template Position Preview

On Friday I had to do some work on an Oracle Application Express (APEX) application of a client which I did some time ago. I had to create a new region next to an existing region on a page which had already several other regions on it. Normally no big problem, you would just use the "Column" property of the region and you are done. To make it short, it didn't work because of the layout of the template and the existing regions which are already using the "Column" property.

So I had to work with the "Display Point" property of the region, to "reset/close" the HTML table of the previous regions and start with a new fresh HTML table which has it's own cells/columns, ... But what is the best "Display Point", especially if you are not that familiar with your page template position placeholders anymore?

Do I have to open the page template definition and check out the HTML code of the template and look for the #REGION_POSITION_XX# placeholders? No you don't have to!

On Friday I re-discovered a nice little feature of Oracle APEX which I'm pretty sure I have already seen when first looking at Oracle APEX, but which I totally forgot about. Every clicked on the "Flashlight" next to the "Display Point" select list? It shows you a rendered preview of your page template with the position of the different "Display Points" in your template. A nice feature!


There are so many useful little features built into the Oracle APEX Builder we are most time not aware of during our daily development work. Especially if you are working for a longer time with a tool, you think you know it and you are not that curios anymore to try out and search for features not yet used. But there are some many useful features built in which are sometimes a little bit hidden. I already wrote about some of them, like

• The "View" select list in the page definition,
• Find invalid PL/SQL code in your APEX application or
• SQL Workshop - Commands: Keyboard Shortcut

to just name a few of them.

Do you know other nice features which are not used that often? Share your Oracle APEX Builder tips and tricks!

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Tabular Form alignment with page items

There was a question on the OTN forum about alignment of page items which should look like a tabular form. I thought it might be of general interest, so I created a short posting about it.

As you can see from the posting, the person asking tried several different settings, but got gaps between the fields or they where not aligned as desired.

There is a trick to avoid this gaps, use the following settings:

• Remove what's in the label
• Horizontal / Vertical Alignment = Above
• Template = - select a template -

This will not generate any label information. No gap is generated as it is done when you select "No Label".

The following image shows how it looks like with Label Template set to "No Label".

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