Oracle APEX: Ideas and Feature Requests

There have been a few places for APEX aficionados to express their ideas for future development over the years but the latest Oracle APEX announcement may have passed you by…

Released to the public in August 2021, the new ideas app is a great improvement on the previous one, the app is very user friendly and crucially retains all the data from previous iterations.

In the 6 months that have followed, further UX tweaks have been made, plenty of new submissions have been added and a fair number of ideas have already turned into reality.

In this blog, we quickly cover some popular ideas, big and small, that are still under consideration or have been added to the roadmap/backlog and might be released soon!

FR-1965: Automatic fade out of (success) messages

A small but important UX improvement. Manually closing the success message on apps that require a lot of user input can become tiresome and implementing this effect with JS should be unnecessary.

FR-222: Make it possible to run validations by AJAX

This is a big one, bringing APEX more in line with modern site usability expectations. Hopefully, from a developer perspective, all it would take is a new ‘Before Submit’ processing step that only accepted Validations.

FR-1759: Report Writer & Printing in PDF

Between native APEX and great documentation generating/printing add-ons, like APEX Office Print and PL/PDF, there’s definitely room for some basic out-of-the-box PDF production capability.

FR-1790: Declarative Progress Bars

A genuinely exciting idea for long-running processes/page submissions that hints at a future where page submissions can be handled ‘in the background’ without wrapping everything in AJAX / Dynamic Actions.

FR-1653: Workflow

A native complement to the open-source Flows for APEX add-on already available that brings the BPMN paradigm to APEX.

FR-1851: Interactive Report - Float horizontal scrollbar at bottom of the screen

A simple but effective idea for improving the UX while using ‘larger than page’ reports.

FR-1815: Allow Modal Dialog Title to Include Page Item Values

Another small but long-standing capability gap that currently requires workarounds to achieve.

FR-1852: Allow APEX to generate PL/SQL documentation

This would bring APEX more in line with other cloud-based API gateway providers. Anything that reduces the development overhead, documentation maintenance and customer integration confusion associated with API lifecycle management would be greatly received.

FR-1843: Refresh Region: Keep Pagination and scroll position

A user gripe I’ve heard time and time again, this would ease a lot of headaches for sure. I’m not certain a workaround for this exists across all reports yet either so watch out for future blogs in case one makes an appearance!

FR-1753: Warn me if I reference a bind variable that does not exist

A popular tweak to the developer experience already provided by some browser extensions.

Hopefully, these ideas, and others, spark your imagination and prompt you to submit a few of your own. The APEX team are very engaged in the process and it’s great to see some of these submissions maturing into APEX releases so quickly.

If you are interested in our Oracle APEX Services you can speak to one of our development specialists today, visit Oracle APEX Consultancy or email us at enquiries@dsp.co.uk.