This preface contains:
The following are changes in Oracle Application Express Application Builder User's Guide for Oracle Application Express release 5.0.
The following features are new in this release:
Page Designer
Page Designer is a completely new Integrated Development Environment (IDE) designed to greatly improve developer productivity and quickly enhance and maintain pages within Oracle Application Express.
Cohesive User Experience
No context-switching or drilling down when modifying multiple components. All modifications occur within Page Designer. Undo and redo changes as necessary, before saving the page.
Better Visual Representation
Gain an immediate understanding of how your regions and items are laid out within the Grid Layout. Changes to components on a page are immediately reflected across the Tree and Grid Layout. Additionally, errors and warnings display immediately.
Intuitive Drag and Drop
Page Designer provides an entirely new way to develop pages. In the Grid Layout pane, you can drag new components from the Component Gallery, or move and copy existing components around. In the Tree pane, you can drag to move and copy multiple components at a time.
Enhanced Code Editor
A new code editor provides SQL and PL/SQL validation with inline errors, auto completion, syntax highlighting, search and replace with regex support, complete with undo and redo support.
See "Understanding Application Pages" and "Managing Pages in Page Designer."
New Design and User Interface Enhancements
Oracle Application Express features a user interface focused on improving the user experience through simplicity and removing clutter. The new design features a new color palette, icons, improved menus and navigation, better accessibility and keyboard support, more intuitive page layouts.
Universal Theme
The Universal Theme is new application user interface that does away with excessive templates and supports effortless customizations with Theme Roller, Template Options, and Theme Styles. The Universal Theme empowers developers to build modern, responsive, sophisticated, accessible applications without requiring expert knowledge of HTML, CSS, or JavaScript.
To learn more about the Universal Theme, install the Universal Theme Sample Application. See "Installing a Packaged Application."
Theme Styles
Available in newer themes, such as Universal Theme - 42 and Mobile - 51, theme style is a CSS that is added to the base CSS. Using the Theme Roller utility, developers can change the appearance of an application.
Theme Roller
Adjust a number of style attributes and see changes applied to your application in real time. Once you are satisfied with the result, you can save your changes as a Theme Style directly to your application.
Template Options
Easily customize how buttons, regions, lists, and other template-based components appear. Using template options, you can displays a single template in several different ways using fewer templates but building far more versatile applications.
Theme Subscriptions
Interactive Report Enhancements
Easily create multiple interactive reports on a single page. Interactive reports feature a new user interface for displaying your data, report settings, support for fixed column headers, and is more accessible than ever before.
Modal Dialog
You can easily define modal (and non-modal) pages complete with the ability to utilize standard page processes.
Better Navigation
Static or dynamic lists can be used as the basis for your application's navigation menu and navigation bar. Navigation Menus can be positioned to the top or side of your pages, and can be rendered based on any List template, enabling nested navigation items, keyboard support, and greater accessibility.
New Calendar
A calendar component comes with built in support for month, week, day, and agenda views and is much easier to customize. The calendar is based on the popular FullCalendar library and supports drag and drop, time-based events, and is even responsive.
Mobile Reporting
Build reports that display all of your data on any mobile device, by using reflow table or column toggle. Reflow table wraps each column or changes to displaying multiple lines on very small screens. Column toggle enables you to specify the most important columns, and those which will be hidden as necessary on smaller screens.
Static File Upload
Files uploaded into Shared Components, plug-ins, or themes can be cached by your browser and referenced using relative file URLs. This also enables you to upload a ZIP file. The contents will be automatically extracted and relative file references will stay intact. See "Managing Static Application Files" and "Managing Static Application Files."
See "Deprecated Features" and "Desupported Features" in Oracle Application Express Release Notes.
The following are additional changes in the release:
All content has been updated to reflect release 5.0 functionality.
Oracle Application Express Application Builder User's Guide features a new organizational structure that explains how to edit pages, components, and controls in both Page Designer and Component View.
See "Understanding Application Pages," "Managing Pages in Page Designer," and "Managing Pages in Component View."