A complete guide to #ORCLAPEX Dynamic Actions

Last year, Craig Sykes and I were discussing ideas for presentations at Tech16 and one idea made us quite excited to turn in to a paper for submission.

We hadn’t seen a presentation on a complete coverage of all the Dynamic Actions available in APEX 5 – yet alone attempted to demonstrate every single event, action and property in 50mins.
Dynamic Actions are a feature we use every single day; we knew a lot about it and we had some creative implementations we’d take from projects to demonstrate. It was also an opportunity to learn a thing or two whilst investigating the more underused features.

The premise is that APEX developers regularly use the Click, Change or Page Load events; but how often would you use Resource Load for example? and what could it be used for?

We start simple with an implicit Dynamic Action, the Cascading LOV, which gives the impression of a Change event with a Refresh action – however no explicit Dynamic Action is created, making pages more lightweight to maintain.

Moving on in to more detail; we covered:

• The Key Down event which can used for powerful instant searching techniques.
• Making the Rich Text Editor responsive using the Resize event.
• Using Event Scope to bind Dynamic Actions to dynamic content.
• Mouse events such as mouse enter, leave, move, dragging & dropping and using client conditions to determine mouse button presses.
• Dynamic Actions for use with Modal Dialogs such as Cancel Dialog and Close Dialog with a Refresh action on the parent page.
• Extending Dynamic Actions using Plugins.
• Using the APEX JavaScript API for running client side actions.
• … and more

We demonstrate repurposing events such as Select; we demonstrate a use for Double-Click and we even show how to create your own Custom Dynamic Action events and call them on demand from JavaScript.

For those developing mobile applications; a new range of Dynamic Actions are available such as Swipe, Touch, Tap and more are available.
We concluded the presentation with some upcoming features in 5.1 and a summary.

Dynamic Actions are extremely powerful and flexible for the APEX developer and by understanding their use and how to customise, repurpose and extend; you can quickly master them. Knowing more about Dynamic Actions enables the PL/SQL developer to build functionally rich APEX applications without being a semi-pro at JavaScript.

Please see our video below:

Author: Matt Mulvaney

Job Title: Senior Oracle APEX Development Consultant

Bio: Matt is an experienced APEX solution designer having designed numerous complex systems using a broad range of Oracle Technologies. Building on his previous experience of Oracle Forms & PL/SQL, he is entirely focused on providing functionally rich APEX solutions. Matt promotes APEX as a software platform and openly shares best practises, techniques & approaches. Matt has a passion for excellence and enjoys producing high quality software solutions which provide a real business benefit.