Getting Started

App Builder

Introduction

The App Builder is a low code, high productivity integrated development environment where you can develop applications on top of your data.

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Building Your First App

The best way to get started with the Oracle APEX App Builder is to build an app.

First, let's determine what kind of data you want to build your application on. You can easily create apps based existing tables you already have, based on data in a spreadsheet, or based on an entirely new data model. Explore the videos below that walk you through each scenario and teach you how to start using the App Builder.

Design and Develop Apps

In Oracle APEX, your application is defined primarily by pages and shared components. Use the Create Page wizards to create new pages, or use Page Designer to modify your existing pages. You can use Property Editor to edit various settings and options, and then run your page to see the result.

Page Designer

Page Designer is a powerful IDE that includes a toolbar and multiple panes, used to maintain and enhance pages within Oracle APEX applications.

Page Components

Screenshot of Page Components The left pane includes rendering, dynamic actions, page processing, and shared components on the page. You will generally interact with the rendering tree, in the first tab, to quickly select one or more page components to work on in the Property Editor in the right pane.

Drag and Drop Layout

Screenshot of Page Layout The central pane includes tabs for Layout, Search and Help. The Layout tab displays an abstracted view of your page where you can use drag and drop to create or re-arrange components on your page. You can also search components within the page from the Search tab, or view context-sensitive help for the selected property in the Help tab.

Property Editor

Screenshot of Property Editor The right pane features the Property Editor which enables you to view and edit all of the associated properties of one or many components at a time. Similar properties are grouped together into collapsible sections and you can use the Filter at the very top to quickly narrow the set of properties.

Importing and Exporting Apps

You can easily move your application from one environment to another.

Once you have completed an app, or you just want to take a back up, click on the export / import button. An app export is a plain-text file with a .SQL extension that can be read by any text editor. As such an export file can readily be uploaded into any source control system as part of your version control. DBAs can check out these application definitions and then import them into test and production environments using tools such as SQL Developer or SQL*Plus. Developers can readily import these .SQL files into any Oracle Database with Oracle APEX (of that version or later) installed.

Shared Components

Shared Components are used to define various common controls in a centralized place that can be used multiple times across an application. For example, you can define your application navigation menu, list of values, authentication schemes, and more. This allows you to maximize reuse of your page components resulting in increased consistency and productivity.

Supporting Objects

Use Supporting Objects to define database object installation and upgrade scripts that are invoked when importing an application. You can also define deinstallation scripts to drop objects when deleting an application. Supporting objects allow you to package both the application and database objects needed in a single file.

Rapid Iterative Development

Oracle APEX allows developers to easily switch between design-time and run-time modes when building pages.

Developer Toolbar

Screenshot of Developer Toolbar The Developer Toolbar is displayed near the bottom of your screen when running your app as a developer and allows you to quickly jump back into the App Builder.

Theme Roller

Screenshot of Theme Roller Theme Roller lets you easily customize the color scheme and other UI settings in real time when running your app. You can open this by clicking on the Theme Roller button in the Developer Toolbar.

Live Template Options

Screenshot of Live Template Options You can also control various display options for many page components by clicking the Quick Edit button, in the Developer Toolbar, and hovering over the component and clicking on the Live Template Options icon.