Refresh APEX Calendar

Sometimes it’s the simple little things that can add polish and make your Apex application shine. One simple little thing that you can do is add a Refresh button to improve the usability of your Apex 5 calendar. This makes it easy for the user to see recent changes on the database, e.g. if events had been added or changed since the page had last been loaded.

1. Set the Static ID on the Calendar region (e.g. “eventscalendar“)
2. Add an Icon button (Button Template = “Icon”) to the calendar region
3. Set the button’s Static ID (e.g. “refreshbutton“)
4. Set Icon CSS Classes to “fa-refresh“
5. Set Action to “Defined by Dynamic Action”
6. (optional) Set Template Option -> Style to “Remove UI Decoration”
7. Add a Dynamic Action to the button, Event = “Click”
8. Set Fire on Page Load to “No”
9. Add a True Action “Execute Javascript Code” with the code below:

$("#eventscalendar_calendar").fullCalendar("refetchEvents");

This calls the refetchEvents method of the FullCalendar object. Replace the “eventscalendar” part of the id with whatever static ID you set on the Calendar region in step #1.

Now, to add a bit of pizzazz you can get the refresh button icon to spin while the calendar is being refreshed. To do this, change the dynamic action code to this instead:

$("#refreshbutton span.t-Icon").addClass("fa-spin");
window.setTimeout(function() {
  $("#eventscalendar_calendar").fullCalendar("refetchEvents");
  window.setTimeout(function() {
    $("#refreshbutton span.t-Icon").removeClass("fa-spin");
  }, 1000);
}, 50);

This code starts the refresh icon spinning before invoking refetchEvents, then stops the icon spinning after it has completed. Note that these are done via timeouts (otherwise the icon isn’t repainted until after the entire javascript function has completed). I added a wait of 1 second prior to stopping the spinning because most of the time the refresh is too quick to notice the spinning effect.

You can, if it makes sense in your case, also make the calendar automatically refresh itself periodically, using some simple javascript: add the following function to the page Function and Global Variable Declaration:

function refreshCalendar() {
  $("#refreshbutton span.t-Icon").addClass("fa-spin");
  window.setTimeout(function() {
    $("#eventscalendar_calendar").fullCalendar("refetchEvents");
    window.setTimeout(function() {
      $("#refreshbutton span.t-Icon").removeClass("fa-spin");
    }, 1000);
  }, 50);
}

Then add this to start the timer in the page attribute Execute when Page Loads:

var periodicrefresh = setInterval(function() {
                                    refreshCalendar();
                                  }, 30000);

In this example, I’ve set the timer to go off every 30 seconds. Not only does it refresh the calendar, but the user gets feedback on what’s going on because the refresh button icon is spinning. Be careful not to set the timeout too low, or else your database could get very busy!

The function I’ve declared can now also be reused by the button’s dynamic action, so I can replace the DA javascript with simply:

refreshCalendar();

APEX Developer Toolbar Options

One of the things that used to bug me about the Apex developer toolbar was that it sometimes obscured the content I was trying to test at the bottom of the page; you could turn it off but then next thing you want to access it you have to jump through the hoops to turn it back on again.

I just noticed it now has some new display options which solves this problem perfectly:

• Auto Hide – I turn this on so that it slides almost completely out of the way when I don’t want it (move your mouse over it to make it pop out again, click into your page to hide it)
• Show Icons Only – once you’re familiar with the options you can shrink the toolbar to show only the icons (hover over the icon to see the label)
• Display Position – put it on the Right-hand side of the window instead of the bottom

Media player in APEX

Quite a long time ago I made a collection of MP3s available from our APEX website and made them playable within the browser using Google’s shockwave player, using code like this:

<embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
       flashvars="audioUrl=#FILE_URL#"
       src="/3523697345-audio-player.swf"
       width="400"
       height="27"
       quality="best">
</embed>

This relies on the user’s browser being able to run flash applications. It looked like this:

With HTML5, however, this is no longer required, so I’ve updated it to:

<audio controls preload>
  <source src="#FILE_URL#" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio>

Not only is it simpler and no longer requires flash, it looks much nicer as well:

Note: you may or may not want to include the preload tag, especially if you have more than one audio control on a page.