Page Items – APEX Corner

CLOB in APEX Rich Text Editor

This post is valid up to Oracle APEX 20.01 version, when there is CKEditor version 4. From APEX 20.02, when creating new Rich Text Editor page item, it’ll be created as CKEditor version 5 and parts of the codes below won’t work.

It’s been a while since the last time I posted something, but there were no new challenges, which always inspire me to share the solutions with you, until last week. I was tasked to build dynamic surveys, where users can define their own questions. This resulted into decision of building a function in a package, which returns HTML of the survey in CLOB. In another application we already used load and save CLOBs so I reused the code and behold, I got apex.ajax.clob is not a constructor error. What caused the error and how to solve it is what I’ll be talking about today. If you are interested about an article about surveys, I might do it in future, but now I’ll focus more on the standard use of CLOB column in application and that’s using it together with APEX Rich Text Editor.

Cascading Shuttle Boxes

From the first time I started working with Oracle Application Express (several years back) I liked it. Only few small things bothered me at time, but with every version it always got better. For example I hated tabular forms, but love to use interactive grids now. The only thing I don’t recall ever changing are cascading list of values. I still use them, but some native behaviour bothers me every time I implement them. Mainly I’m speaking about the fact, if you change parent list, all cascading child lists are refreshed and all selected values are cleared. In select lists it can be overlooked, but where it infuriate me are shuttle boxes, where – in cascade you might have several shuttle boxes, selected dozens items, just to be cleared if you remove one item from the parent box. This problem lead to article you’re about to read.