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!

« ... Read full posting ... »

ApexGen: A new Oracle APEX related open source project!

Morten Braten just released this first Alpha Version of this new project called ApexGen - The Oracle APEX Generator. From the project description:

ApexGen is a utility to generate Oracle Application Express (Apex) pages and page components based on a PL/SQL API, in a fraction of the time it takes to manually create report and form pages.

I have downloaded the files and had a quick look at the documentation. Actually it's a much nicer documentation than mine for the ApexLib Framework. Clean and very nice layout! To my rescue I can say that I already redid the layout for my Oracle APEX Builder Plugin project a few weeks ago, because I thought it needs better marketing. Just haven't announced the new web-site yet. But back to the topic. :-)

The tool and the scope of the project looks really interesting and can really speed up your development! As soon I have more time I have to take a more detail look at the source code and how I can use it. From my quick look at the documentation, I noticed that Morten is using the same $KEYWORD$ hint syntax than I'm using for the ApexLib Framework. Now I'm sure, it can only be a good piece of software :-)

Great to see that there are also other people starting Oracle Application Express (APEX) related open source projects!

Check it out and give Morten some feedback! That's what motivates an open source developer to continue developing!

« ... Read full posting ... »

Oracle APEX Builder Plugin v1.7 release!

Oracle APEX Builder Plugin version 1.7 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?

Do you also have a screen which is bigger than 800x600 for your Oracle APEX development? Have you ever noticed that it looks like that the textareas on the Oracle APEX Builder pages where we enter our SQL statements, PL/SQL code,... are designed to fit for this resolution? A lot of space is unused next to the textareas. It would be much better if the textarea would use it so that we can put a little bit more code into a line.


That's exactly what the new version of the plugin does. It adjusts the width of the textareas to use this unused space!


Another new feature is the "Repad sequence numbers" configuration for the "Set" feature of the plugin, which you can use to renumber the sequence numbers of your page items, ... in the bulk edit pages. Thanks again Anthony Rayner for providing the configuration!

Note: With this release I have also upgraded the internally used jQuery library to the newest release. Unfortunately a few features have been removed in the newest version. Please check the "Upgrading the Plugin" section in the HowToInstall file for details. It was also necessary to update the configuration files for the ApexLib integration, please get the new set from the ApexLib download page. And don't forget to clear the browser cache when to have replaced the config files!

Get it now!

Download it from the Oracle APEX Builder Plugin homepage and check the HowToInstall file for all the necessary steps to install it.

What is planned for the next release?

I'm currently playing with the integration of an editor which offers syntax highlighting, auto indent, search/replace, bracket matching, full window editor, ... instead of the boring textareas.

I'm currently looking for beta testers to test and to give input. The following is a screen capture of the integration. So if you are interested, send me a mail. You can find it in my blog profile.

« ... Read full posting ... »

A "hidden" gem of Oracle Application Express

Oracle Application Express (APEX) has a "hidden" gem (ok, there are a lot of others too) which in my opinion isn't widely used by the developers.

Be honest, how often do you use the little "View" select list on page definition?

You should, because it has several useful entries which can make your life easier! But let's have a quick look at the different options.

Events

That's a really useful feature for Oracle APEX beginners, because it shows you for the current page the flow of events when a page is processed or rendered. If you check the "View All" radio option it even shows you the events which would fire if you would have defined them. That helps you to identify which event you have to use so that it's executed at the right time. I think that's an invaluable feature to get used to the different events of Oracle APEX!

BTW, it also incorporates the events of page 0 and from application level. I'm not sure if that was always the case, but at least in 3.0.1.x everything is included to get a complete picture.

A screen capture of one of the pages of the ApexLib demonstration application showing the different events.


Objects

Need to know which tables, views, packages, ... are used/referenced by the current page? That option will show all of them. The function is really clever how it get the effected objects. It's creating temporary stored procedures for all the code blocks and checks the data dictionary to get the references to the different objects.

Another nice side effect of this function is that you can determine if all your PL/SQL and SQL code is compilable, because it will also show you all the code blocks where a parsing error occurred.

History

Quick info who last modified the page. Very useful in a multi developer environment.

Export

Have you screwed up the page? Use the export page feature in combination with the "As of x minutes ago" feature to get the old version back.

Enhancement request: Why not add an option "Undo" with the "As of x minutes ago" which restores the page to that point in time?

Groups

Are you using the page group feature? If you don't, you should! Create them with the "Page Groups" link in the "Tasks" sidebar of the overview of all the pages. The assignment is done in the page attributes. But back to that feature. It will allow you to quickly navigate to the other pages which are in the same group!

Referenced

Shows you all objects which are referencing this page. But be aware that it doesn't show all of them, there seems to be a bug with report column links and it will not show you the reference if you have created a manual link in an HTML region or in a SQL statement.

Last visited pages

The last few entries of the select list contain the last few visited pages for quick navigation.


So what do you think? Have I raise your attention to take a closer look at this feature so that you use it more often in your daily development?

Also see

• Find invalid PL/SQL code in your Oracle APEX application

« ... Read full posting ... »

Oracle APEX Builder Plugin available for Internet Explorer

The Oracle APEX Builder Plugin is now also available for Internet Explorer!

For a long time I was looking for a Greasemonkey like add-on for Internet Explorer. I found several of them, like Greasemonkey for IE, Trixie or Turnabout. But the drawback of all of them is that they are not maintained anymore. In most cases development stopped already more than a year ago and the homepages do not mention if they work with Internet Explorer 7 or not.

On Saturday I finally found IE7Pro, which supports IE 6/7. And the good news is that it's actively developed. It has some other features too, but I was just interested in the scripting feature.

After adapting my Greasemonkey APEX Builder Plugin script yesterday, I'm proud to announce Oracle APEX Builder Plugin release 1.6 with support for Internet Explorer and Firefox!

Internet Explorer users can now gain the same productivity enhancements in there Oracle APEX Builder as Firefox users. Like

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

Download the new version and follow the HowTo Install file for the necessary installation and configuration steps.

« ... Read full posting ... »