APEX 24.1 New Features Roundup

Over the past few months, we have published several blogs on the new features released in APEX 24.1. In case you missed any of them, you can read them here:

• Building a Euro 2024 App with APEX and AI Assistance
• Improvements to Working Copies
• Improvements to Template Components
• AI-Powered Apps
• APEX Approvals and Workflow Enhancements
• Document Generator Remote Printing

To finish off looking at the new features of APEX 24.1 in this blog, we will look at some of the other notable improvements and new features.

Auto-Dismiss Success Messages

A new application-level setting has been added to the User Interface section of the Application Definition to enable the auto dismissal of success messages.

When turned on for an allocation, all success messages will be automatically dismissed 5 seconds after being displayed. If the user interacts with the message before the 5 seconds are up, the countdown resets itself.

Although a great new declarative feature, you should be sure to consider any accessibility impact of messages automatically disappearing to avoid important messages being missed. The new setDismissPreferences function within the apex.message JavaScript API can be used at runtime to turn the feature on or off programmatically and alter the dismiss duration.

New Page Items

New page items Select Many and Select One have been added to provide more flexibility and styling when selecting one or more items from a List of Values. As the names suggest, the Select Many item type allows the user to choose multiple entries from an LOV, while the Select One item allows one.

Both item types allow the user to search the displayed list of values to filter the options. As the user types into the search box, the available options are automatically filtered. When using the Select Many type, the chosen values are displayed as chips, which can be removed by clicking on the X icon.

You can also style the options using Template Directives to format the results as required, add icons and add conditional formatting.

The results can be returned as either a colon-separated list or a JSON string.

Shared Component Improvements

I’m a big fan of the ability to use component subscriptions, and APEX 24.1 has added some improvements to this area.

Component Subscriptions

Read-only

Subscribed components are now read-only and can no longer be changed independently in the child application. Any changes must be made to the master component and then published.

Automatic Dependency

Shared components can refer to other shared components. For example, a subscribed application process may use an authorisation scheme that is also subscribed. APEX 24.1 has improved the automatic dependency resolution by re-using existing components with the same name or automatically copying over a dependent component.

Subscription Status

A new column to display the status of any subscribed components is available on all shared component reports. This makes it easy to identify any components that need to be refreshed.

Bulk Refresh

When viewing components that support subscriptions, you can use the Refresh Subscriptions task menu option to bulk refresh all subscriptions from the master.

Shared Component Groups

A new option has been added to the Other Components menu within Shared Components to create Component Groups. This essentially enables you to create collections of shared components.

Once you have created a component group, you can copy, subscribe, or bulk refresh in a single action.

Additional Updates

Date Picker Support for Filters

When creating search facets using dates on a Faceted Search or Smart Filters report, you can now use the date picker and set your own format mask.

Button Processing

Enabling the new Show Processing option for a button will disable any page interactions during processing by greying out the page and displaying the processing animation. This prevents users from clicking a button multiple times when performing slow-running processes.

Dynamic Action Enhancements

You can now create dynamic actions on items using the Input browser event, which fires every time listed input items change. For example, you can use this to filter a report as the user types into a search field. The event is not the same as the Change event, as that only fires when value is committed by actions such as the user pressing enter or selecting another item on the page.

Note: The Input event is not triggered when the value of an item is changed programmatically using JavaScript.

Declarative File Download Support

It is now simpler to download BLOB and CLOB files from your applications using the APEX_HTTP API or even easier with the new Download dynamic action.

APEX_HTTP API

Previously, the typical approach to download a file from the database was to add a page process to query the file and then use the owa_util, htp, wpg_docload & apex_application APIs to download it.

Now, we can simplify the solution using APEX_HTTP.

Download Dynamic Action

However, to make it even easier to download a file, you can use the new Download dynamic action. Simply create the dynamic action and provide the source.

Database Dependency

Developers can now use the APEX_APP_OBJECT_DEPENDENCY API to analyse their applications and determine database dependencies. It can be used to return all database objects used on a single page or within the full application, detailing the component categories they are used by.

Alternative Report Column Labels

A new attribute for an Alternative Label has been added to Interactive reports, which is used in dialogs. This is particularly useful if you use HTML tags to format your report headings.

For example, previously, if you added HTML tags to a report heading, you would see them in filters and when selecting columns.

However, now you can specify an alternative label as follows:

This tidies the report up nicely.

Summary

I hope you have found our APEX 24.1 new feature blogs useful over the past couple of months, and I think you will agree there have been some great new features and improvements added to this release.

For more information, check out our Oracle APEX Services, and if you liked this blog, check out our other APEX blogs here.

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