KScope 2015 - APEX part 1

APEX 5.0 and other cool APEX features/changes

Things I picked up from this years sessions

This is first part of tips and tricks that I picked up during this year's KScope. As mentioned in my intro post there were so many interesting presenters who made us make a difficult choice choosing which session to attend.

Among the ones I attended here are best bits I picked up to carry home:

• page designer - Some would say here they (I) go again but if anything you could pick up on these sessions and chats around the room new Page Designer brings a lot to a table. It may take some time to get used to but once on board things are faster and more accessible making us us more effective
• keyboard shortcuts to access most needed designer features - Alt+Shift+F1
• Apex now supports advanced code editing features such as redo changes
• ability to duplicate objects
• regular expression are supported
• LIVE FEED in page designer that lets us know what is wrong when making changes or creating objects
• themes are now more responsive, versatile and customizable
• label items width is now configurable
• ability to load your own icon library is simplified
• numerous options to improve look and feel of Lists, Cards, Tabs or Carousel region
• menu Lists now can be hierarchical and easily convertible from top to side menu with a note that new hierarchical menu sub items can not have icons associated with it
• theme roller - probably most favorable feature of all people who are into design or have struggled with it in the past. 
• mobile windows support
• multiple interactive reports on same page
• IR have a pivot option
• there are now far fewer templates ~ 52 compared to 102 in some previous versions
• APEX_JSON package
• APEX_ZIP package
• APEX_UTIL.html_pct_graph_mask - very handy way to produce charts lines in your reports which has been present from early versions
• api.oracleapex.com to access official APIs - handy way to access documentation
• apex.oralce.com/ut - short cut for useful APEX 5 theme examples
• JQuery mobile page at some stage has both pages present at the same time which can be an issue if same region IDs are used!!!!
• use cool Chrome development features for debugging mobile apps like emulators etc.
• all application files will now be exported with application export and
• workspace export takes all apps and users and application images with it
• session state protection is now enabled by default
• modal page pages functionality from APEX 5.0 can be taken to older themes with some minimal page changes
• new apex_page.get_url function - acts as alternative for APEX_UTIL. PREPARE_URL
• new variables available in APEX authorization process: app_component_type, app_component_id, app_component_name
• new post authentication process
• New Substitution Syntax Features for escaping values &P1_TEXT!HTML. &P1_TEXT!RAW. &P1_TEXT!JS.
• use chain JQueries, execute all in 1 line instead of n lines 
• stop_apex_engine is an exception which actually stops any APEX page processing and changes are not committed - this can be caught with apex_application.e_stop_apex_engine
• APEX_MAIL.push_queue() procedure has an implicit commit in it! This is something to be aware of
• in Oracle 12c on tables instead of sequence and triggers for table IDs you can use GENERATED ALWAYS AS IDENTITY

Regards,

SLino