Skip to main content

APEX 5 New Supporting Objects Features

By
In the current version of APEX the Supporting Objects feature is undervalued. You can create (sort of) self installing applications with it, but it is not widely used. Why? Because people don't realy know the feature or people do and experience lack of functionality. In both cases : Check out the functionality of APEX 5!
When you have scripts for creating tables, packages etc., in the current version you have to manually keep those install scripts in sync with "reality". You have to do it manually - so it'll go wrong sooner or later. But in APEX 5 you can sync your scripts with the click of a button. Well, in fact two clicks: one for the check box and one for the button. See the animation below.
So when you click "Refresh Checked" your script will be recreated, reflecting the current situation of your database.
Well how does that work? If you click on the pencil icon and then navigate to the "Script Editor' tab, you'll see that the script is associated with objects. You can add objects here or remove the association - your script will be recreated automagically. Please notice you can't add your own code in these scripts because it'll be overwritten.
And to make it even easier for you - and eliminating the need to run APEX in Developer Mode in the target environment - you can now enable "auto install" of Supporting Objects. Thus Supporting Objects will be installed even from withing SQL*Plus or SQLDeveloper!
When you export an application you can set the corresponding preference like below.
One nice enhancement request maybe: I would like to have a "Refresh Checked" option on export as well! So I can refresh all my source code upon export ....

 So these are a few more reasons to use Supporting Objects in your next APEX5-project!

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Filtering in the APEX Interactive Grid

By
Remember Oracle Forms? One of the nice features of Forms was the use of GLOBAL items. More or less comparable to Application Items in APEX. These GLOBALS where often used to pre-query data. For example you queried Employee 200 in Form A, then opened Form B and on opening that Form the Employee field is filled with that (GLOBAL) value of 200 and the query was executed. So without additional keys strokes or entering data, when switching to another Form a user would immediately see the data in the same context. And they loved that. In APEX you can create a similar experience using Application Items (or an Item on the Global Page) for Classic Reports (by setting a Default Value to a Search Item) and Interactive Reports (using the  APEX_IR.ADD_FILTER  procedure). But what about the Interactive Grid? There is no APEX_IG package ... so the first thing we have to figure out is how can we set a filter programmatically? Start with creating an Interactive Grid based upon the good o...
1 comment
Read more

Stop using validations for checking constraints !

By
 If you run your APEX application - like a Form based on the EMP table - and test if you can change the value of Department to something else then the standard values of 10, 20, 30 or 40, you'll get a nice error message like this: But it isn't really nice, is it? So what do a lot of developers do? They create a validation (just) in order to show a nicer, better worded, error message like "This is not a valid department".  And what you then just did is writing code twice : Once in the database as a (foreign key) check constraint and once as a sql statement in your validation. And we all know : writing code twice is usually not a good idea - and executing the same query twice is not enhancing your performance! So how can we transform that ugly error message into something nice? By combining two APEX features: the Error Handling Function and the Text Messages! Start with copying the example of an Error Handling Function from the APEX documentation. Create this function ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Refresh selected row(s) in an Interactive Grid

By
In my previous post I blogged about pushing changed rows from the dabatase into an Interactive Grid . The use case I'll cover right here is probably more common - and therefore more useful! Until we had the IG, we showed the data in a report (Interactive or Classic). Changes to the data where made by popping up a form page, making changes, saving and refreshing the report upon closing the dialog. Or by clicking an icon / button / link in your report that makes some changes to the data (like changing a status) and ... refresh the report.  That all works fine, but the downsides are: The whole dataset is returned from the server to the client - again and again. And if your pagination size is large, that does lead to more and more network traffic, more interpretation by the browser and more waiting time for the end user. The "current record" might be out of focus after the refresh, especially by larger pagination sizes, as the first rows will be shown. Or (even wors...
Post a Comment
Read more