“We always click ‘Apply Changes’, then we click the button we actually wanted” – a user
Typically an Apex report with an “Open” or “Edit” icon will simply do an immediate navigation to the target page, passing the ID of the record to edit. When the user clicks this link, the page is not submitted and the user is instead redirected.
It’s easy to quickly build large and complex applications in Apex but it’s also very easy to build something that confuses and disorients your users. They only need one instance when something doesn’t work how they expected it to, and they will lose trust in your application.
For example: if most buttons save their changes, but one button doesn’t, they might not notice straight away, and then wonder what happened to their work. If you’re lucky, they will raise a defect notice and you can fix it. More likely (and worse), they’ll decide it’s their fault, and begrudgingly accept slow and unnecessary extra steps as part of the process.
You can improve this situation by taking care to ensure that everything works the way your users expect. For most buttons in an Apex page, this is easy and straightforward: just make sure the buttons submit the page. The only buttons that should do a redirect are those that a user should expect will NOT save the changes – e.g. a “Cancel” button.
For the example of an icon in a report region, it’s not so straightforward. The page might include some editable items (e.g. a page for editing a “header” record) – and if the user doesn’t Save their changes before clicking the report link their changes will be lost on navigation.
To solve this problem you can make the edit links first submit the page before navigating. The way I do this is as follows (in this example, the report query is on the “emp” table:
- Add a hidden item
P1_EDIT_ID
to the page
- Set Value Protected to No
- Add something like this to the report query (without the newlines):
'javascript:apex.submit(
{request:''SAVE_EDIT_ROW'',
set:{''P1_EDIT_ID'':''' || emp.rec_id || '''}
})' AS edit_link
- Set this new column to Hidden Column
- Modify the edit link Target:
- Type = URL
- URL =
#EDIT_LINK#
- Add a Branch at point “After Processing”
- Modify any existing Processing so that the request SAVE_EDIT_ROW will cause any changes on the page to be saved.
You can, of course, choose different item names and request names if needed (just update it in the code you entered earlier). For example, to make it work with the default Apex DML process you might need to use a request like “APPLY_CHANGES_EDIT_ROW”.
Now, when the user makes some changes to the form, then clicks one of the record Edit links, the page will first be submitted before navigating to the child row.
Adding buttons to Apex pages is easy. Making sure every last one of them does exactly what the user expects, nothing more, and nothing less, is the tricky part!
UPDATE 11/10/2018 – new feature added in Oracle SQL Developer 18.3
Juergen Schuster, who has been enthusiastically trying OraOpenSource Logger, raised an idea for the debug/instrumentation library requesting the addition of a standard synonym “l” for the package. The motive behind this request was to allow our PL/SQL code to remain easy to read, in spite of all the calls to logger sprinkled throughout that are needed for effective debugging and instrumentation.
In the judgement of some (myself included) the addition of the synonym to the standard package would run the risk of causing clashes on some people’s systems; and ensuring that Logger is installable on all systems “out of the box” should, I think, take precedence.
However, the readability of code is still an issue; so it was with that in mind that I suggested that perhaps an enhancement of our favourite development IDE would go a long way to improving the situation.
Therefore, I have raised the following enhancement request at the SQL Developer Exchange:
Logger: show/hide or dim (highlight) debug/instrumentation code
“The oracle open source Logger instrumentation library is gaining popularity and it would be great to build some specific support for it into SQL Developer, whether as a plugin or builtin. To enhance code readability, it would be helpful for PL/SQL developers to be able to hide/show, or dim (e.g. grey highlight) any code calling their preferred debug/instrumentation library (e.g. Logger).
“One way I expect this might work is that the Code Editor would be given a configurable list of oracle object identifiers (e.g. “logger”, “logger_logs”); any PL/SQL declarations or lines of code containing references to these objects would be greyed out, or be able to be rolled up (with something like the +/- gutter buttons).”
Mockup #1 (alternative syntax highlighting option):
Mockup #2 (identifier slugs in header bar to show/hide, with icons in the gutter showing where lines have been hidden):
“Gold-plated” Option: add an option to the SQL Editor’s right-click context menu – on any identifier, select “Hide all lines with reference to this” and it adds the identifier to the list of things that are hidden!
If you like the idea (or at least agree with the motive behind it) please vote for it.
Oracle 12c introduced the ability to specify sequence.nextval as the default on a column, which is really nice – including the fact that it eliminates one of your excuses why you don’t decommission those old triggers.
Unfortunately it doesn’t work as you might expect if you use an INSERT ALL
statement; it evaluates the default expression once per statement, instead of once per row.
Test case:
create sequence test_seq;
create table test_tab
( id number default test_seq.nextval primary key
, dummy varchar2(100) not null );
insert into test_tab (dummy) values ('xyz');
1 row inserted.
insert all
into test_tab (dummy) values ('abc')
into test_tab (dummy) values ('def')
select null from dual;
Error report -
SQL Error: ORA-00001: unique constraint
(SCOTT.SYS_C00123456) violated
A minor issue, usually, but something to be aware of – especially if you’re not in the habit of declaring your unique constraints to the database!
create sequence test_seq;
create table test_stupid_tab
( id number default test_seq.nextval
, dummy varchar2(100) not null );
insert into test_tab (dummy) values ('xyz');
1 row inserted.
insert all
into test_tab (dummy) values ('abc')
into test_tab (dummy) values ('def')
select null from dual;
2 rows inserted.
select * from test_tab;
i dummy
= =====
1 xyz
2 abc
2 def
ADDENDUM 28/10/2016
Another similar scenario which might trip you up is where you are inserting from a UNION view:
create sequence test_seq;
create table test_tab
( id number default test_seq.nextval primary key
, dummy varchar2(100) not null
);
insert into test_tab (dummy) select 'x' from dual;
-- success
insert into test_tab (dummy)
select 'y' from dual union all select 'z' from dual;
-- fails with ORA-01400 "cannot insert NULL into id"
insert into test_tab (dummy) select c from (
select 'y' c from dual union all select 'z' from dual
);
-- success