“Before Header” Branch

It’s well known that after processing a page one often needs to add a Branch so the user is taken to another page, e.g. to start the next step in a process. It’s less common to need a Branch that is evaluated before the page is shown. This is a “Before Header” Branch and I use it when the user might open a page but need to be redirected to a different one.

A good example is a page that is designed to direct the user to two or more different pages depending on what data they requested.

Another way that a branch like this can be useful is where a user might navigate to a page that should show a record, but if the record ID is not set, I might want the page to automatically redirect the user back to a report page instead.

Of course, you have to take some care with these sorts of branches; if the target page also has its own “Before Header” branch, that will also be evaluated; if the user ends up in a loop of branches the page will fail to load (with a “ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS” error).

This is the order in which various steps are done before APEX shows a page:

1. Authentication check
2. Verify session
3. “Before Header” Branches
4. Authorization check
5. Computations
6. “Before Header” Processes
7. Regions, etc.

One of the implications of the above order is that any computations or processes that set or change application state (e.g. an application item) are not run before it evaluates conditions or attributes for any “Before Header” Branches. This applies regardless of whether the computations or processes are defined on the page, or defined globally in Shared Components. This little detail tripped me up today, because I had a branch that I needed to run based on a condition that relied on state that should have been set by a “Before Header” process defined globally.

If you need to redirect a user to a different page on the basis of any application state that is set by a computation or process, you can use a PL/SQL Process instead that does the redirect. The PL/SQL code to use is something like:

apex_util.redirect_url(p_url => apex_page.get_url(p_page => 1));

Warning: redirect_url raises the exception ORA-20876: Stop APEX Engine, so it’s probably preferable to avoid combining this with other PL/SQL code that might need to be committed first.

Jeffrey Kemp 14 June 2019

APEX / apex-19.1 / tips-&-tricks /

About Jeffrey Kemp

Application Designer & Developer at Oracle specialising in Oracle APEX (Application Express), Oracle SQL and PL/SQL. Oracle ACE Alumni ♠️. Piano player, father, husband, Christian. The views expressed on this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle.