6 min read

Oracle Application Express 4.0 with Ext JS

Oracle Application Express 4.0 with Ext JS

Deliver rich desktop-styled Oracle APEX applications using the powerful Ext JS JavaScript library       

Theme basics

Out of the box, APEX comes with twenty themes, each theme comprising a collection of templates used to define the layout and appearance of an entire application. An application can have many themes, but only one theme is active at any time; switching themes is done at design time only.

You can create custom themes, which may be published, either within a workspace by a Workspace Manager or for the whole APEX instance by an Internal Workspace Manager. Publishing a theme encourages consistency across applications.

A theme comprises nine template types: breadcrumb, button, calendar, label, list, page, popup list of values, region, and report. A theme must have at least one of each of the nine template types.

Within each template type are a set of predefined classes and eight custom classes. For example, the label template has the following classes:

  • – Not Identified –
  • No Label
  • Optional Label
  • Optional Label with Help
  • Required Label
  • Required Label with Help
  • Custom 1… Custom 8

Programmers use these templates to construct the HTML pages that make up an application. Each page is declaratively defined using metadata to select templates to be used for the presentation.

The APEX engine dynamically renders an HTML page using the metadata, assembling relevant templates and injecting dynamic data into placeholders within the templates. The HTML page is viewed when you request a page through a web browser. When you submit a page, the APEX engine performs page processing, once again using declaratively defined metadata to perform computations, validations, processes, and branching.

This type of processing is a typical Model-View-Controller(MVC) pattern, where the view is the HTML generated using the application templates. The APEX engine is the controller and receives the GET or POST input and decides what to do with it, handing over to domain objects. The domain objects model is encapsulated in the page definition and contains the business rules and functionality to carry out specific tasks.

Separation of concerns

The MVC pattern also promotes another good design principle—separation of concerns. APEX has been designed so that the APEX engine, templates, and the application functionality can be optimized independently of each other.

Clearly, the process of assembling and sequencing the steps necessary to render a page, and process a page are important to the overall solution. By separating this out and letting Oracle deal with the complexities of this through the APEX engine, it allows programmers to concentrate on providing business functionality.

Equally, by separating presentation templates from the business logic, it allows each aspect to be maintained separately. This provides a number of advantages including ease of design change, allowing templates to be modified either by different people or at different times to enhance the interface without breaking the application.

An excellent example of this is the standard themes provided in APEX, which have been designed to be completely interchangeable. Switching standard themes is simply a matter of loading a theme from the repository and then switching the active theme. APEX then remaps components to the new active theme using the template class identifiers.

Standard themes

We will be building our own custom theme rather than using one of the twenty pre-built ones. Nevertheless, it’s worthwhile knowing what they provide, as we will build our custom theme by using one of them as a “starter”.

Building a Ext JS Theme into Oracle APEX

Looking at this image, we can see a preview of the standard APEX themes. Each theme provides a similar interface, so really each standard theme is just a visual variation on the others. The colors used are a little different, or the HTML layout is tweaked slightly, but in reality they are all much the same.

Theme 4 is used by APEX as the “starter” theme and contains one template for each template class for all the template types—a total of 69 templates. Theme 19 is also worth noting as it’s designed for mobile devices. Each of these themes are full of good HTML practices and show how and where to use the substitution strings.

Creating a theme

When creating a theme, you can choose to copy one from the repository, create one from scratch or from an export file. The repository and export file options copy the entire theme, and you start editing the template to suit. Creating a theme from scratch creates a theme without any templates. You then need to define templates for each different type before you can switch from the active theme.

In my opinion, the easiest way to build a new theme is to take the approach that the application should always be in a working state, and the way to do this is to create a new empty TEMPLATE application using a standard theme and build from there.

From this working base, you can progressively convert the templates to use Ext functionality, building simple test pages as you go to verify the templates. These test pages also form part of your template documentation, allowing team members to examine and understand specific functionality in isolation.

Once a theme has templates for each of the nine template types, you can publish the theme into the workspace to be used by your business applications.

The following screenshot shows a dialog named Create Workspace Theme from the APEX wizard. Notice that you can change the theme number when you publish a theme, providing a very simple mechanism for you to version control your themes.

Building a Ext JS Theme into Oracle APEX

A published theme can’t be edited directly once it has been created, but using a TEMPLATE application, you can republish it using a different theme number. Applications can have multiple themes, but only one active theme. By switching themes, applications can easily test a new version, safe in the knowledge that changing back to the earlier version is just a matter of switching back to the prior theme.

So before we go any further, create a new TEMPLATE application based on Theme 4, and let’s begin the process of creating our Ext JS theme.

Building a Viewport Page template

Several of the examples provided with Ext feature the Viewport utility container, including the RSS Feed Viewer shown in the screenshot below. The Viewport automatically renders to the document body, sizing itself to the browser viewport and dividing the page into up to five distinct regions; the center region is mandatory, with north, south, east, and west regions being optional.

Building a Ext JS Theme into Oracle APEX

Viewport regions are configurable, and by setting a few simple attributes, you quickly find yourself with a very interactive page, with expanding/collapsing regions and splitters to resize regions by clicking and dragging with the mouse.

We are going to build a basic viewport for our APEX page template including all five regions.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here