Menu Popup with Declarative List

In the past when I’ve needed to add half a dozen or more buttons to a page, I’ve sometimes encased them in a Collapsible region so that the user can slide them out of the way instead of clogging up the screen. Recently however I’ve started (sparingly) using a Menu Popup, as per this tutorial. The issue I have with this method, however, is that the menu items are defined in a shared component (a List) which means it’s not defined on a per-page basis.

Some of the actions simply need to do a Submit on the page, which is simple enough: set the URL Target to something like:

In other cases, the action needs to do something more specific to the page, e.g. show a region:

apex.theme.openRegion("popupQuestion")

Or the action might need to navigate to another page, passing parameters based on specific items on the page. This means the list, defined in Shared Components, now has hardcoded elements that are only useful for that one page; more to the point, they are defined outside of the page – I’d rather that everything specific to a page is defined within that page’s definition.

The approach I’m using now is to use a custom trigger. Each list item has its URL Target set to something like:

The third parameter is set to a unique code that the page can use to identify which menu option was chosen. This parameter will be passed to this.data in the custom trigger’s event handler.

On the page, I have a Dynamic Action with the following attributes:

• Event: Custom
• Custom Event: menuAction
• Selection Type: JavaScript Expression
• JavaScript Expression: document
• True Action: Execute JavaScript Code, e.g.:

switch(this.data) {
  case 'OPEN_POPUP':
    apex.theme.openRegion("popupQuestion");
    break;

  default:
    apex.submit({request:this.data,showWait:true});
}

Note that to do a simple Submit on the page, all I need to do is set the request on the third parameter of the menu item’s URL. If I want to do something slightly different for a particular request, I can put an extra “case” in the JavaScript code to handle it.

The benefit of this approach is that this trigger becomes the jumping-off point for all such menu actions for this page. In theory I could re-use the same List on multiple pages (if the items in the list are generic enough) but have different behaviour occur for each menu item specific to each page. The only challenge with this approach might be if you needed some conditions on each menu item, e.g. so they are shown or hidden in specific circumstances. If the condition for a menu item references a particular page item the List will no longer be generic and re-usable. For this reason, I usually still use a separate List for each menu for each page.

Perhaps in a future release of APEX we will gain the ability to define a List on a Page instead of in Shared Components. In the meantime, if you are interested in all the details on this method (including a solution for implementing a redirect to another page, or to open a modal page), refer to this tip.

EDIT 22/8/2019: Thanks to Robert Gerstein who noticed an issue with this solution when using Internet Explorer. A workaround for this is to not call apex.event.trigger directly in the URL on the list item, but to call a function instead (refer to comments below).

Jeffrey Kemp 14 August 2019

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

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.