Page Designer
Introduction to Oracle APEX 5 New Features
Lesson 7 – Page Designer
>> Tyson: Let’s take a second here to talk about how we’re going to work on this form. There are some really nice drag-and-drop features.
So if you want to reorder items, you can just click and drag. ENAME has now been moved. You can see I have some buttons here. You can see I also have my item types showing up.
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Hey, Dave, are there any initial questions on the Page Designer?
>> Dave: You bet. What’s the difference between item level and region level buttons?
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>> Tyson: That is one thing that it seems like so small but it’s one of my favorite changes about APEX 5. The answer to that question is there isn’t. There is absolutely no difference between item level and region level buttons. There’s just a button.
So if you’ve ever had to go through the pain of changing a page item button to a region item button, you no longer have to do that. A button is a button.
[pause]
So if I go and I click on one of these buttons, one thing that I really like is that this detailed menu over here on the right-hand side is always going to look the same for no matter which button you click on. The behavior of how a button is going to work is consistent, and so there’s no gimmick or there’s nothing different about the buttons.
[pause]
Let me click “Save” here. Here you can see I still have the button name “Save” which is going to be the request when I click the button. But one thing that I think is pretty cool is that if I go up here and I want to add a new button.
[pause]
I want to add a page component. And, actually, I think I should be able just to click here and create button.
[pause]
I actually went ahead and created a button. It says it created down on the below region section. I’m going to go ahead and move this button. I’m just going to put it in this little Help section here. Now I can just go ahead and “Save To” button.
It’s pretty easy to go ahead and add another button or add components. And I can drag and move this button around.
One thing that I want to point out is that these changes have not been saved yet. So if I cancel this and run this again, notice that that “Save” button isn’t showing up yet. All these changes are stored here on the Client. They haven’t been pushed to APEX yet.
I’m going to go ahead and click “Run” and here it’s doing some processing here.
[pause]
Unfortunately, the alert is not showing up quite as nicely as I would have hoped. But basically, this is telling me that the changes have now been persisted to the database. So I should now, when I click “Edit,” I see my “Save To” button.
That’s really cool. You can make changes and you can actually back out of your changes. You have an undo feature, if you will. So if you’re working on something and things just start going awry, you can just say, “You know what. Hold that. I don’t know what I did but things are looking really weird. I’m going to back out.”
That right there saves a lot of time because if you worked with APEX before and you’re making a lot of different changes on the page and the dots aren’t connecting as you thought they would, sometimes it’s nice to be able to back up and say, “Hold on. Let me start over.”
[pause]
Let me go back to editing. I want to go to page 3.
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One thing that’s really, really cool about this, the Page Designer, is that if you’ve ever had to convert an automated row fetch and row processing to be a custom PL/SQL logic, one thing that you’ve had to do is you’d have to go into each item and you have to change the source from being a database column to be static assignment, and you can do a pretty good job in some of the utility reports at the workspace or page level to be able to edit multiple items at the same time. You don’t have to leave the page anymore to do those types of really cool things.
What I can do is I’m going to select the EMPNO item and then I’m going to hold Shift and click the DEPTNO item. I have now selected all of these items.
[pause]
If you look over here on the right-hand side, you can see all these different properties that can be modified. I would avoid the blue stuff whenever possible because – actually, I don’t even know if it will let you update this because sequence is something that needs to be unique. Database column, you’re likely not going to be setting all these to the same database column.
However, you do want to change the type to static value. I updated all of these items at the same time. You’ll also see that they immediately turned red. Let me go here.
[pause]
Here it’s telling me that the page item-P3_EMPNO-source-static value is required. So it is going to bark at me. I may go back, set this to database column. Static value. And then I can modify these other details here.
Point being is that I can very quickly get to changing some of the properties on multiple items at the same time. If I do something that is maybe going to break my application or break my page, that APEX will try to warn me as best it can over here in Messages.
[pause]
If for whatever reason, I want to try to find something on my page, previously on the upper right-hand corner there used to be a Search box that you could use.
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