APEX 20.2 New Reporting Features

A pre-production version of APEX 20.2 has been released to apex.oracle.com, so I decided to try it out starting with taking a look at the new report printing features.

• Built in PDF and Excel downloads for Interactive reports, Interactive Grids and classic reports.
• All download formats for Interactive reports can now be emailed.

You can read more about the new features of 20.2 here and request a workspace to try them yourself here.

Classic Reports

To enabled PDF printing for a classic report you need to enable the printing option within the region attributes tab. This adds the “Print” option to the bottom of your classic report to generate a PDF version of what you see on screen.

Enabling this feature also adds the “Printing” tab to the region where you can further customise the output.

There are many options available here to customise the output, such as:

• Changing the file format from PDF to Excel, Word, HTML and XML
• Custom headers and footers
• Changing the font style, size and colour

Changing the file format to excel generates an excel version of the report complete with column headings and the filtering option turned on.

Interactive Reports

The option to generate PDF and Excel files for an Interactive report is enabled by default when you create a new IR region. For existing reports you can switch the options on via the download format options within the region attributes tab.

When you select the download option for the Interactive Report you get the download modal, which now has some additional options. Here you can select the new Excel and PDF options as well as choosing to email the files.

As with a classic report the region also has a “Printing” tab for customising the output.

Interactive Grids

Like Interactive Reports the PDF and Excel options are turned on by default when you create a new IG region and you can customise the output format using the “Printing” region tab.

Interactive Grids also have the option to email the download file.

I think this is a great new feature for APEX reports and I’m looking forward to trying some of the other new features, in particular the new APEX_REGION.EXPORT_DATA and APEX_DATA_EXPORT APIs for programmatically generating PDF, CSV, Excel, HTML, JSON and XML files.

Author: Colin Archer 

Job Title: Senior Oracle APEX Development Consultant

Bio: Colin is a Senior Development Consultant at DSP-Explorer with 20 years’ experience of analysis, design, and development of bespoke Oracle applications for a wide variety of business functions. Building on his previous experience of Forms and PL/SQL he is now focusing on developing high quality fit for purpose solutions using APEX.