Skip to Main Content
Feature Request FR-1831
Product Area Application Builder
Status CLOSED

147 Voters

Provide APEX pages with regions programmatically.

niels.de.bruijn Public · Aug 24 2021

Idea Summary
Provide a public PL/SQL API with which you can create/maintain APEX pages including their regions. 

Use Case

  • 3th party app generator that can be used for migration purposes
  • Enable developers to provide alternative APEX builders
  • Enables tight integration of APEX extensions
We reviewed this idea carefully, and while it was interesting, we concluded that it is unlikely to make its way into APEX in the foreseeable future.

Known Duplicates

Known duplicates

FR-2543
FR-2543 Provide facility to create pages/regions/components dynamically by providing APIs
FR-4057
FR-4057 Enable command line interface for APEX applications.

Comments

Comments

  • john.snyders APEX Team OP 3.9 years ago

    The use cases are clear and important. The mechanism could be a structured text file. I believe this has advantages over an API: more declarative, easier to support

  • gabriel.diaz.arias OP 3.9 years ago

    This would be amazing, as many times you have custom ways to do things, or standards that could be completely automated with a proper supported way to do it without hacks. Also this would allow us to perform global refactors much easier. Now you have to search all ocurrences manually and replace them one by one.

  • niels.de.bruijn OP 3.7 years ago

    I agree that accepting a JSON document is better for the outside world, but I would also support PL/SQL to keep it simple for APEX developers that might not be familiar with JSON. In the end, PL/SQL calls are made anyhow.

  • chris.shannon OP 3.7 years ago

    Excellent suggestion. Glad to see it under consideration

  • kfd357 OP 3.6 years ago

    We could use this too!

    (Ulrik Larsen)

  • maik.becker OP 3.6 years ago

    I like this idea!

  • dita.gabalina2 OP 3.6 years ago

    I have survey / monitoring app which dynamically generates forms for user specified survey questions.  It would so much easier to develop it  if such API existed.

  • nasrshbb OP 3.6 years ago

    Last couple of weeks I had similar requirements. I wish we have it in the future. Good idea.

  • lbrizzi OP 3.6 years ago

    Great idea! I also see a link between this idea and the depreciation of APEX_ITEM. Isn't it easy for the development team to expose some of their own page/region generating API's (and enhance them a bit) , which they use at the end of the wizards to create them in the builder?

  • shankar_ns OP 3.6 years ago

    It will be worth it. We have so many pages that are identical to each other with the only difference being the Table/View. A generator would save so much time

  • morten OP 3.3 years ago

    I have wanted this ever since I started using APEX more than 10 years ago. Imagine being able to generate dozens or hundreds of pages in an instant using your own script.

  • jack.wells OP 3.2 years ago

    Agreed… I've wanted this since APEX was called HTML DB, and I echo the sentiments of most of the other comments here!  To be honest it's surprising it has gone this long without it, but I suppose it's because of the various “hack techniques” available.  But APEX should have a formally supported “App Generator API” with the same robustness Oracle offered with the Designer Repository PL/SQL API still available after 30 years.  With an APEX App Generator API, we could not only develop converter utilities to migrate applications from the Designer repository and directly from the Oracle Forms API, but think of the possibilities for programmatically migrating off of .NET, MS Access, and other non-Oracle tech stacks!

  • arun mohan OP 3 years ago

    Agreed. This is a much-needed feature. This would allow the end-users to generate dynamic pages.

  • yuri_slutsky OP 2.7 years ago

    I'm using the API to create an APEX page and understand how and what works from the page's SQL export.

    My problem is updating an existing page. I'll take a look at the APEX_UI_DEFAULT_UPDATE package.