Oracle APEX 20.1 Top New Features

The new Oracle Application Express (APEX) Release 20.1 is giving companies a few more reasons to develop on the low code platform or migrate their legacy applications there. Here is a short overview of APEX 20.1’s most important new features plus tips on how to implement them. 

Mega Menus

The navigation menus in Universal Theme have been expanded to support a new mega menu user interface.

To enable the Mega Menu in your Oracle APEX Application:

Go to Shared Components => User Interface Attributes => Navigation Menu and set List Template to Top Navigation Mega Menu.

This is the result:

Oracle JET Library Upgrade

Oracle JET 8.0.0 is now supported with APEX 20.1.

One-click Remote Application Deployment

• Deploy an application to remote Oracle Application Express instances using REST Enabled SQL references.
• Deploy directly to Oracle Autonomous Database (ADB) from on-prem or elsewhere once ADB is upgraded to 20.1

Report Printing

Integrated PDF printing is now supported for Interactive Grids. You should make sure that PDF is activated as an additional download format in your region attributes. Users can change the page orientation and size in the download dialog.

Print Report as PDF:

This is the result:

Session Timeout Alerts

There are no more unexpected session timeouts! Users are now notified shortly before their session expires and have the option to extend it. A second warning is displayed when the session expires.

Redwood UI

The APEX and App Builder user interfaces have been updated to better adapt to Redwood, Oracle’s new user experience design language.

Friendly URLs

The URL syntax for pages and applications has been simplified to allow friendlier URLs. The friendly URL support is activated by default on the Application Definition instance for new applications.

To enable friendly Url for old Applications:

Go to Shared Components => Application Definition Attributes => Properties

Faceted Search Enhancements

Faceted Search has been enhanced to allow for cascading list of values, conditional facets and compact count display, among other enhancements.

Data Loading for Oracle Autonomous Database

Data loading has been enhanced to support loading files from Oracle Cloud OCI Object Storage.

Existing features improvements

New APEX_IG PL/SQL API

• RR to reset an interactive grid
• CR to clear an interactive grid filter settings
• IG_<your_report_column> syntax to filter a report for an exact match.

• IGC_<your_report_column> for a contains match
• IGGT_ and IGLT_ for greater than and less than filters

Download Authorization Check for Interactive Report and Grids