Skip to main content

Using Static Files in APEX has never been easier !

By
Almost every APEX Developer knows that JavaScript and CSS belongs in separate files and (in 99% of the use cases) not somewhere in your Page properties. If you have this code in separate files it is easier to use them in a Version Control System (SVN or Git) - if the files are outside of APEX. And the code you store in these files can be reused, in contrast to the stuff you store on Page level.
In a lot of environments it is harder to use external files, because deployment of these files to the appropriate location on a webserver requires special privileges that not everybody has. In those cases storing these files as Static Application Files or Static Workspace Files might be a better solution.
It makes deployment easier, because these files will be exported and imported as part of the application. You can't accidentally forget about them. But working with these files is quite a pain. When you need to edit something you have to download that file, make the changes, upload it again and refresh the page to see the result (either positive or negative). One tool that overcomes that repeated cycle in APEX Nitro. Nitro uses JavaScript (node) behind to seems to facilitate the upload / refresh part of the development cycle. Pretty cool. But it is another tool that runs outside your browser and it requires the installation of node. No big deal but still.

Just recently I stumbled upon a tweet of the guys from FOEX telling about a new initiative FOEX Open Source (a.k.a. FOS). And they started this initiative by releasing a browser extension - for Firefox and Chrome - that facilities editing of Static JavaScript and CSS Files straight in the browser. Big advantage: No more uploading, changing, uploading cycle anymore. Just change, save and refresh!

When you install the browser extension, a little Select List appears in the page where you can see your Static Application (or Workspace) Files. You can just select one of your files there and a built-in editor appears with all the nice Visual Studio Code features we all know and love.
So you have syntax highlighting and can edit multiple files at the same time in different tabs - either behind each other or next to each other (left to right or top to bottom).
And it's not just that you van Edit and Save the file, there is also a "Minify" option. So you can even do that directly from with APEX! That is really cool.
And to top that all off, you can also create (or edit) Less files and compile these to CSS (and minify them) in one go. 
So no more excuses for not using files anymore! It will never get easier than this ....
You can download the extension from the webstores for Chrome and Firefox.






Comments

Veerendra P said…
Hi Roel,
I imported the chrome extension. When I open the file, edit and save, it always hangs for for me. After some time I get the error
saying cannot save because the session may have expired.

I am using APEX 19.1, hosted on AWS using standalone ORDS.

Any suggestions please?
10:29 pm
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

apex_application.g_f0x array processing in Oracle 12

By
If you created your own "updatable reports" or your custom version of tabular forms in Oracle Application Express, you'll end up with a query that looks similar to this one: then you disable the " Escape special characters " property and the result is an updatable multirecord form. That was easy, right? But now we need to process the changes in the Ename column when the form is submitted, but only if the checkbox is checked. All the columns are submitted as separated arrays, named apex_application.g_f0x - where the "x" is the value of the "p_idx" parameter you specified in the apex_item calls. So we have apex_application.g_f01, g_f02 and g_f03. But then you discover APEX has the oddity that the "checkbox" array only contains values for the checked rows. Thus if you just check "Jones", the length of g_f02 is 1 and it contains only the empno of Jones - while the other two arrays will contain all (14) rows. So for ...
Post a 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