Blog Archive

  • Enabling Persistent Auth in an Existing APEX App

    Overview A new APEX 22.1 feature I’ve been eagerly waiting to use in my production APEX apps is persistent authentication. It will allow my users to avoid having to login again every time they open my app in their phone or browser. After enabling the feature at the instance level, I needed to slightly adjust my existing application’s login page to take advantage of this new capability. This article explains how I figured out the minimal changes needed to update my existing APEX application to use this new sought-after “Remember me” functionality. Enabling Persistent Auth at Instance Level Persistent authentication…

  • 21.2: Fine-Tuning Initial Render of Tabs & Cards

    If you use a Static Content region with the Tabs Container template to present subregions on separate tabs, in APEX 21.2 you might notice during initial page render that you momentarily see the contents of all the tab “pages” before they disappear behind the initially selected tab. Depending on the contents of the tab pages, the result may be more or less noticeable. However, since one of my applications presents multiple tabs of colorful Badge Lists, the “Easter eggs” below compelled me to search for a solution… Luckily, my colleagues Tim and John helped me with a combination of simple…

  • Trick to Reference Field Value in Dynamic Action on Grid Column

    The Oracle APEX interactive grid region is a richly functional component with a JavaScript API for all aspects of its multi-row user interface and client-side data model, but this article concerns something simpler. I was recently building an application with an interactive grid and wanted the change in one date field in the row to update the value of another date field in the same row. I knew it would be simple to achieve, but there was a little trick I needed to learn from a colleague to crack the nut. Consider the interactive grid below that displays an Order…

  • Checking If a Region’s Data Source Returned Any Data

    Oracle APEX lets application developers easily use any data they need. A region’s data can come from a local table or view, the rows returned by a SQL query, a REST service’s response payload, or rows from a table, view or query sent to a remote, REST-enabled SQL database. APEX also supports the conditional visibility of regions and page items using a declaratively-configured “server-side condition”. Let’s consider a use case that combines these features to show or hide a region based on whether it contains any data. In other words, if the region’s data source returns rows, then show it,…

  • Adding Tags Using Multi-Value PopupLOVs and Smart Filters

    Overview Google’s Gmail was the first app I remember that popularized users’ inventing their own descriptive labels and applying them as “tags” to data. Instead of moving an email from the “Inbox” folder into one named “Charitable Donations 2019 USA”, for example, it encouraged me to tag the message with multiple, distinct labels like “2019”, “taxes”, “charitable donations”, and “USA”. While not initially as intuitive as folders, this approach quickly proved its value. It let me quickly locate mails related to a particular year, to charitable donations, to taxes in general, or to the US, or any combination of those…