APEX Session State for Forms Developers

Session State may well be an unfamiliar concept to Oracle Forms Developers although it is a really powerful part of Oracle APEX which is important to master.

Session state holds the values of page items e.g. check boxes, Text Items, Select Lists, etc.

The session will not be updated unless you submit the page.

By submitting the page, most commonly through a button press, all the values from the screen overwrite any existing values the session may have held for those page items.

A submit can be accompanied by a submit request. Basically this is a word or short phase which serves as an indicator to which button submitted the page and for which process or process you wish to run.

Working with a session state has many advantages; the key ones are that the page items retain their values when the page is accessed and also that values from session can be accessed from any page.

All processes including PL/SQL dynamic actions interact with the session directly; therefore when a Create button is clicked, page items will be submitted in to session for the “Create Record” page process to run and insert values in to the database.

Working with Page Items and Session is quite different from Oracle Forms to APEX but there are similarities too.

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.