From the first time I started working with Oracle Application Express (several years back) I liked it. Only few small things bothered me at time, but with every version it always got better. For example I hated tabular forms, but love to use interactive grids now. The only thing I don’t recall ever changing are cascading list of values. I still use them, but some native behaviour bothers me every time I implement them. Mainly I’m speaking about the fact, if you change parent list, all cascading child lists are refreshed and all selected values are cleared. In select lists it can be overlooked, but where it infuriate me are shuttle boxes, where – in cascade you might have several shuttle boxes, selected dozens items, just to be cleared if you remove one item from the parent box. This problem lead to article you’re about to read.
Interactive Grid calculations and validations
This article is the continuation of my series about Interactive Grids. I’ve started with simple button customization, dived little bit deeper into the Interactive Grids javascript model and all the other control options, which are given to us there and finally it’s time to look on the Interactive Grid itself. I faced somewhat difficult problem, which I’d be able to solve with JavaScript and HTML quite easily, but not in the way, that would satisfy me in our APEX application. From the solution of this problem came the idea for this article. I hope it’ll be helpful for somebody someday.
Interactive Grids more customization
Previous article about customization of interactive grids was about updating the default buttons, their look and text. Not even week passed, when I was in need to add some explanation text to the toolbar of interactive grid. Obviously there was always option to use jQuery and DOM modification, but I didn’t know how that will behave on the region only refresh and so on. Thus I decided to fulfil at least partly my promise and dig little bit deeper into the JavaScript of interactive grids.
Interactive Grids button’s customization
One of the features I always hated in the previous versions of APEX (before 5) were tabular forms. I never got then, they were always behaving funky, it was hard to debug and I preferred to write dynamic tabular forms by myself then with the built in functionality. It changed with the release of Interactive Grids with the Oracle APEX version 5.
When I’ve started working with them it was in the English speaking company and I didn’t face the problem I had later in Czech company, where I wanted to customize or translate buttons. It was not difficult to understand words like “edit” or “save” for users, but I wanted to have consistency in these buttons across the whole application.
Yet another Blog about APEX
What do you say, when you start new website? Hi? Anyway, this is my new blog (I have others about different topics). Hopefully this will be an interesting read for everybody who is looking for information about Oracle Application Expres (APEX). But more than that – it will probably be a place, where I’ll be saving some snippets of codes which were useful in the past and which I have always troubles search for again.
Without further ado, more blurb soon… I promise.