Skip to main content

ApEx 2.2 Evaluation

Looks like the ApEx folks have an Evaluation Version of ApEx 2.2. Just got my credentials and was able to sign on.

At first glance, you will notice that the Application Builder pages have been given a face-lift:




There are also some new icons next to the "Run" icon for Comments, Page Locks, Export the Page, and Search.

Three new Themes have made it into Release 2.2: Blue Gray, Dark Blue, & Modern. I'm a fan of Blue Gray, but could take of leave the other two.

One of my favorite new features has to be the way report columns are re-ordered. Prior to Release 2.2, each time you wanted to move a column up or down, you had to submit the page. Now, thanks to some DHTML, you can easily and quickly move columns up and down. This alone will save me time on my use of the tool.

On that same page, each section has been moved to a DHTML "hide & show" region - no more scrolling to the lower depths of the page to set up CSV export! This approach was also implemented in the Region Attributes section as well.

A feature which I have been doing by hand has also been added. It's call Access Control. According to the New Features feedback page:

"When adding a new page to an applicaiton, APEX 2.2, now offers an Access Control Page option. Selecting this option creates 2 tables in your application schema, a screen to manage those tables, and authorization schemes that check the values of those tables. Together, these wizard-generated pieces allow you to declaratively add access control (authorization schemes) to your application."

There's some more features which I'll try to take a look at and report back on a little later. You can see what these and all of the new features are here. Raj from the ApEx team tells me that there will also be a New Features document shortly.

Comments

Dimitri Gielis said…
Great post Scott!
I just requested my APEX 2.2 workspace too. I'll post my findings also on my blog.
May 10, 2006 at 6:11 AM
Aman.... said…
Hi Sir,
Isnt it that one's same credentials for APEX2.0 will also work for APEX 2.2 or one has to request for them specifically?
regards
Aman....
May 12, 2006 at 9:08 AM
Scott said…
Isnt it that one's same credentials for APEX2.0 will also work for APEX 2.2 or one has to request for them specifically?

No, you have to specifically request an account on the 2.2 instance here: http://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=eval22

- Scott -
May 12, 2006 at 9:30 AM
Anonymous said…
My favorite new feature in 2.2 is the Reorder items popup page.

The beautiful thing about that page is that as you change the New Line, New Field, Colspan attributes at the top of the page, it instantly shows you a quick preview of how the item layout will look like at the bottom of the page. Sweet!
May 16, 2006 at 12:08 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Custom Export to CSV

It's been a while since I've updated my blog. I've been quite busy lately, and just have not had the time that I used to. We're expecting our 1st child in just a few short weeks now, so most of my free time has been spent learning Lamaze breathing, making the weekly run to Babies R Us, and relocating my office from the larger room upstairs to the smaller one downstairs - which I do happen to like MUCH more than I had anticipated. I have everything I need within a short walk - a bathroom, beer fridge, and 52" HD TV. I only need to go upstairs to eat and sleep now, but alas, this will all change soon... Recently, I was asked if you could change the way Export to CSV in ApEx works. The short answer is, of course, no. But it's not too difficult to "roll your own" CSV export procedure. Why would you want to do this? Well, the customer's requirement was to manipulate some data when the Export link was clicked, and then export it to CSV in a forma...
76 comments
Read more

Manipulating Images with the... Database?

A recent thread on the OTN HTML DB Forum asked about how to determine the width & height of an image stored as a BLOB in an Oracle table. I mentioned in that thread that I have some code to manipulate an image stored in a BLOB column. This is particularly useful if you’re going to let users upload images, and you want to re-size them to display as a thumbnail. Thanks to Oracle interMedia , it is trivial to manipulate the width, height, and other attributes of images stored in an Oracle table. I’ve created a sample application here which demonstrates Oracle interMedia and HTML DB in action. Feel free to have a look. You can download this application from HTML DB Studio as well. Basically, this application allows you to upload images and perform an operation on the image as it is inserted into the PHOTO_CATALOG table. There are two places where some PL/SQL code is required: an After Submit process on page 2, and a procedure to display the images. Here is the PL/SQL for the After...
33 comments
Read more

Page 0 Branches

What? There's no way to put a Branch on Page 0 of an ApEx application! Or is there... Technically, no - page 0 does not support branches. But how many times do you wish it did? This scenario recently came up: I wanted to put a "Search" box on every page in my application, so no matter where a user is, they can search the site. Currently, it has 10 or so pages, but this will grow to closer to 50 by production. So, thought #1 was to put an text item on Page 0, call it search, and then ensure that each and every page had some sort of Branch to run the search. Not so fun, as this was a tedious task, even for just 10 pages. And each time a new page was added to the application - by myself or anyone else - the search branch would have to be added to the page. Clearly not a scalable solution. With a little bit of help from Raj from the ApEx team, I came up with this solution: Create Page 0, if you haven't already On page 0, create an item of type "Text Field (...
13 comments
Read more