Apps To Fusion

• Developers are users who create or edit applications
• Workspace Administrators are users who perform administration tasks specific to workspace like managing user accounts, services and monitoring workspace activity
• Oracle APEX Administrators are superusers that manage an entire hosted instance using the Application Express Administration Services application.
• End Users have no development privileges

• Application Builder is where you build apex applications. You can also import / export applications from sql files.
• SQL Workshop is like web version of SQL Developer. You can browse database objects in your schema, run SQL commands, create SQL scripts and use Query Builder to create a sql query using its GUI.
• Utilities has numerous useful tools for monitoring database, viewing meta data about APEX.
• Administration is used to manage sessions, caching, users and monitor activity.

Most part of development time is spent in Application Builder building pages, applications or SQL Workshop running queries. SQL Workshop is self explanatory if you use SQL Developer or any SQL, PL/SQL interface tool. I will focus mainly on Application Builder.

Application Builder Concepts

Application Builder has collection of apex applications. Your oracle.apex.com account comes with a sample application. You can run or modify this application.


The following terminology are important to know when working with Application Builder:

• Workspace: A workspace allows multiple developers to work within the same Oracle Application Express installation. It can be based on one or more database schemas. As a rule workspaces should be organized such that they contain applications that are related to each other.

• Application: It is a collection of pages and branches connecting them. Its attributes include authentication scheme, default UI templates. Application is synonymous to project in JDeveloper.

• Page: A page is the basic building block of an application. When you build an application in Application Builder, you create pages that contain user interface elements, such as tabs, lists, buttons, items, and regions.

• Region: Content is displayed in regions, which are logical subsections of a page. Each page can have any number of regions of several different types. These types include: HTML text, SQL Queries, PL/SQL-generated HTML, and charts. Each region is rendered using a region template. Regions are positioned on the page using display points defined in the page template.

• Item: An item can be a text field, text area, password, select list, check box, and so on. Item attributes affect the display and behavior of items on a page. For example, these attributes can impact where a label displays, how large an item is, and whether or not the item is displayed next to, or below the previous item. The value of an item is automatically stored into the application's session state, which can be referenced at any point within the user's session.

Running sample application

By default you have a sample application in your workspace. It can be used to demonstrate various features offered by Application Express like charts, reports, forms, etc., Run the sample application by clicking on 'Run Application' icon as shown in above screenshot. In the login name, enter user name as demo (or) admin with password as your workspace name in lower case.

Sample application shows an easy-to-use interface for viewing, updating, and searching order and customer information for electronic and computer products. Users can navigate among the pages using the Home, Customers, Products, Orders and Charts tabs.

Home page alone shows a lot of information about Application Express features. The following are the pointers from the above screenshot.

1. URL of the page. Every page in apex is accessed through browser URL, but authorization schemes control user access. Authorization schemes can be specified for an entire application, a page, or a specific page control such a region, item or button. For example, you could use an authorization scheme to selectively determine which tabs, regions, or navigation bar entries a user sees.

URL of the home page was http://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=44970:1:1618122951801106::NO
It includes important information about application, page, session and few more. I will cover in detail in later section.

2. Company logo/text is an attribute of Application definition. It appears on all pages in application. You can use an image or text.

3. Navigation tabs simplifies navigation to specific pages. Type of tabs (One-Level /Two-Level / None) is defined while creating application. Sample application is using One-Level tabs. Graphical representation can be used when defining tabs. Tabs can be conditionally displayed as well.

4. Navigation bar entries provide hypertext based navigation. By default it has Print and Logout entries. Placement (right / left) is determined by page templates.

5. Breadcrumb provide hierarchical navigation to any number of levels. Clicking on breadcrumb entry is associated with a page and also a parent page. Breadcrumb builds up with breadcrumb entries the deeper the user navigates to the pages. Try navigating to Add/Modify customers page by clicking on create button in Customers page, breadcrumb now shows 'Home > Customers > Add/Modify Customers' with hyper links to parent breadcrumb entries i.e. Home, Customers.

Breadcrumb adds another level for easy navigation between pages. You are familiar with it in Oracle EBS Self-Service modules.

6,7,8,9. Home page has four regions (My Quota, My Orders, Sample Application and Tasks). Each region uses different region type. My Quota demonstrates the use of Flash Dial Chart. My Orders is an interactive report which is a feature introduced in Apex 3.1. Both of these regions are based of SQL query. Sample Application region is HTML with simple text. Tasks is a list region using navigation list to branch on other pages in the application.

Interactive report gives users a plethora of personalization options like adding filters, computations, highlight columns based on conditions, save report, search by column values etc.

You can play around with Sample application to get a feel of APEX's rich features. One of the prominent feature is ease of navigation for end users using breadcrumbs, navigation tabs, drill down column links, navigation lists etc.

Once you get a hang of pages and navigation, you can look at how a page is defined by clicking 'Edit Page 1' link at the bottom of the page (or) navigating from Application Builder > Sample Application > 1 - Sample Application page.

Page Definition:

The page definition is divided into three main sections:

Understanding URL syntax is useful when defining navigation to pages using navigation lists or hypertext links. I will cover more on this in coming article. There is so much ground to cover in Application Express, once you start building applications apex is mostly wizard driven and really simple.

In the coming articles, I will do tutorials possibly video tutorial to build a simple application for searching, creating, updating and deleting Person details.