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Feature Request FR-3941
Product Area Developer Experience
Status CLOSED

4 Voters

Make APEX_COLLECTION Names Case Insensitive

aschultz Public · Jul 31 2024

Idea Summary
A frustrating point for developers and DBAs involves the naming convention of APEX_COLLECTIONS. Regardless of experience level, I've met many clients that troubleshoot “cannot insert null" errors or “no data found” errors for hours; only to discover the problem was that they didn't use an uppercased name for the collection.

Use Case
This is especially a trap for DBAs venturing into APEX.  Many DBAs that don't even use APEX are encouraged to still install it because there are useful features that can be utilized (such as collections).  Making them easier to use will leave a much better impression on people new to APEX.

Preferred Solution
Either automatically uppercase the name on the backend or make the name case Insensitive.

We reviewed this idea carefully, and while it was interesting, we concluded that due to all the internal implications we need to take into account, it is unlikely to make its way into APEX.

Comments

Comments

  • richard martens OP 10 months ago

    This is actually not a bad idea… I never had this issue, because my “codes” are ALWAYS uppercased, and I've been doing that for years (hmm I must admit: decades)…

    I still would advise you to call the collections with an uppercase name, this for me just makes the code easier to read. You have a thumb up from me :-)

  • aschultz OP 10 months ago

    @richard martens I totally agree that things should be uppercased, but I've observed this recurring issue from those that are just trying to setup an APEX_COLLECTION for the first time (as a proof of concept).  When people are just trying to get something going to see if it works, they don't always follow strict standards.

  • vincent morneau Admin OP 9 months ago

    I totally understand the reasoning for this idea. However the impact on the APEX product and APIs is too large, for what we think is a education problem. Perhaps we should be clearer in the documentation?

  • aschultz OP 9 months ago

    Hi Vincent and Richard

    Thank you for taking the time to review my idea.  While I was exploring the documentation and looking for the best places to put a note about naming conventions, I noticed something unexpected:

    7.2 Naming Collections

    When you create a collection, you must give it a name that cannot exceed 255 characters. Note that collection names are not case-sensitive and are converted to uppercase.

    It turns out that things are being automatically uppercased already.  I followed up with some of the people that had issues with creating collections and it turns out that they never ran the query:

    SELECT * FROM APEX_COLLECTIONS

    If they would have, they would have seen that the collection was created, but the name was transformed to uppercase.

    I would suggest adding that same note about the character limits and uppercase converted names to:

    7 APEX_COLLECTION
    7.28 CREATE_COLLECTION Procedure
    7.3 Creating a Collection

    Thank you,
    Andrew Schultz