What's New in Oracle APEX 23.1

Template Components

Introducing Template Components, a new plug-in type for building re-usable UI components with support for actions, menus, and custom attributes within Page Designer. These components can be rendered standalone as regions displaying one or multiple rows of data, and can also be within reports as partials for a column.

  • Fully Declarative

    Template Components allow you to create plug-ins with attributes that can be set declaratively in Page Designer. Attributes defined in the plug-in will be available in Page Designer for any column or region using the plug-in type.

  • Actions and Menu Buttons

    With the introduction of Action Positions and Action Templates for plug-ins, you can define Actions and Menu buttons with row-level conditions for Template Components.

  • Universal Theme Components

    Six out-of-the-box Template Components have been added to Universal Theme and are available as region types in Page Designer. These new regions remember pagination, work with faceted search and smart filters, and support the external Order By item.

  • Partials for Report Columns

    Use partial components as Interactive Report column types to display content like avatars and badges or apply a Template Component directly in any HTML Expression using new template directive syntax.

PWA Push Notifications

Low code push notifications, made available with a single switch. Easily notify desktop and mobile users who've opted-in to receive push notifications.

  • Notifications

    Receive push notifications directly on your device, featuring a message title, body, icon, and link. Tap on notifications to be redirected to your APEX app or a specific page of your app.

  • Easy Subscription

    APEX users can subscribe to push notifications from within their applications, while instance administrators can manage a queue of notifications.

  • New Process and API

    A new native process and public API have been added in APEX to handle sending push notifications from APEX applications.

Developer Experience

Modernized Object Browser

The Object Browser delivers a more accessible and streamlined user experience that makes managing database objects easier than ever before.

  • Easy Filtering

    You can now view and filter database objects of all types from a single tree. Stay focused on your filtered subset of objects until you clear or change the filter, even across APEX App Builder sessions!

  • Editing Made Easier

    An enhanced editing experience makes it easy to continue editing the last object you were viewing, and ensures unsaved changes are never lost unintentionally with a new warning on navigation.

  • Improved Performance

    Create common objects more easily from a new landing page and switch quickly between an object's multiple tabs, for example between the spec and body of a package or columns and data of a table.

  • Accessible to Everyone

    Object Browser is now coded to accessibility guidelines, making it easier to work on database objects with assistive technologies such as screen readers.

Page Processing Improvements

Group a sequence of page processes to offload processing to the background or just simplify maintainability of conditional execution.

  • Control Background Execution

    More control over processes executing in the background with the addition of monitoring to the Active Sessions page. Report on running background executions when a page or app is deleted, and allow developers to continue to abort them.

  • Execution Chains

    Introducing a new Page Process Type, Execution Chains. Executing page processes one after another by adding them as children of a chain, and declaratively run chains in the background or foreground.

  • Status and Progress Reporting

    Report on the status and progress of background processes with a new API and APEX view, APEX_BACKGROUND_PROCESS and APEX_APPL_PAGE_BG_PROC_STATUS.

REST Data Source Enhancements

REST Data Sources have been updated to provide more control over source discovery and responses.

  • Invoke API for REST Sources

    The Invoke API process has been extended to support REST Data Sources, providing fully declarative REST invocation for Page Processes and making it simple to map REST Source Parameters to page items, SQL expressions, static values, and more.

  • Discover REST Sources with Swagger

    APEX now supports REST Source discovery based on responses from Swagger/OpenAPI. Create a complete REST Data Source based on a response, including a data profile as well as additional meta data like operations and URL or other parameters.

  • Raw Selectors

    A new switch item has been added to REST Data Source Profiles to select rows as they are. When enabled, all selectors will be used exactly as specified and APEX will not sanitize row and column selectors when generating the SQL query for JSON parsing.

General Builder Improvements

Updates to the APEX Builder enhance the developer experience.

  • Copy Pages from Create Page

    Quickly create copies of pages from the current application or other apps directly from the Create Page wizard. The new Create Page as Copy button available in the Create Page wizard sends you right to the Copy Page wizard, where you can follow the familiar steps to have a copy of a page in no time!

  • Save and Run from Code Editor

    Run pages in Page Designer directly from a code editor dialog without closing using the new Save and Run pages functionality in code editors.

  • Context Sensitive Help

    Links to documentation resources in APEX Builder applications have been updated to include context to allow the documentation to redirect to appropriate book or chapter, increasing the quality of all documentation links from within the APEX Builder.

  • Friendly URLs in Builder

    The APEX Builder has been updated to use friendly URLs, paving the way for future enabling of PWA in Builder.

  • Plug-In Attributes Updates

    The item plug-in infrastructure has been extended to support 25 attributes, up from 15. It is also now possible to define and assign Groups for custom attributes, making it easy to group similar plug-in attributes together.

  • Property Graph Support

    Oracle Database 23ai supports Property Graphs with new SQL syntax. You can now build APEX Page Components directly on a Property Graph using SQL queries. You can also create shared LOVs, Automations and Search Configurations directly on Property Graphs using SQL.

  • SQL Developer Web Integration

    Open SQL Developer Web directly from the SQL Workshop menu in the menu bar. Supported on ORDS version 23.1 and must be configured at the instance level. For workspaces with one associated DB schema that is REST-enabled, SQL Developer Web will open in a separate tab. Otherwise, developers will be prompted by a modal dialog with a list of the schemas to either connect or REST-enable.

  • Capture ECID in Webservice Log

    Configure external web services by passing the Execution Context ID for end-to-end tracing.

  • Application Continuity

    A new app security attribute, Session State Commit, has been added. This controls how changes to session and item values plus accompanying commits are handled. These are deferred to the end of request processing for new apps, while old apps have the changes immediately written and committed.

New and Updated Components

Improvements to APEX Administration

  • Admin Digest

    Monitor the health of your Instances, Workspaces, and Schemas with daily metrics and trend charts, made available daily in the new APEX Administrator Digest. View top Workspaces, Apps, and Users, investigate Workspace details, and monitor everything through a single Dashboard.

  • Auto Provisioning Restrictions

    Managing the creation of workspaces in an instance just got easier with a new UI and API that allows you to define and manage a block list of email patterns. Query a block list when auto-provisioning a workspace to restrict email addresses that match the pattern on the block list.

  • New APEX_APPLICATION_ADMIN API

    The APEX_APPLICATION_ADMIN API has been added, allowing developers to programmatically interface with admin jobs.

Universal Theme and UX Improvements

Universal Theme has been updated with new built-in Template Components, an enhanced Region Display Selector, improved page rendering performance, and more.

  • New Template Components

    Universal Theme now includes Template Components for Avatar, Badge, Comments, Content Row, Media List, and Timeline. Many of these components are intended to replace Classic Report templates that provided similar design patterns, but now available as fully declarative Template Components that are far easier to configure and use.

  • Improved Icon Fidelity

    Application icons generated for PWAs have been updated to apply the appropriate masking so it looks appropriate on more platforms and devices.

  • Region Display Selector Enhancements

    Region Display Selectors now support displaying region icons next to titles in Region Display Selector tabs, and control tab selection on page load with new options for remembering the last selected tab. Region Display Selectors also support APEX_REGION.RESET to reset user or session preference for tab selection.

  • Export and Import in Theme Roller

    Easily download and upload themes directly from the Theme Roller interface from the new Actions menu button. Watch Video (1:46)

  • Improved Rendering Performance

    Collapsible and Region Display Selector regions paint even faster during page load to reduce flickering.

  • Template Updates

    Updates to the Hero and Title Bar templates provide a new Up button position. The Standard and Report region templates have also been updated to include a new Alignment Template Option, allowing for additional control over the alignment of Order By items.

Approvals Component Enhancements

The Approvals component now supports due dates for creating approval tasks.

  • Due Date Item

    The Due Date item is now available as a property for the Human Task - Create process plugin. When specified, this value will override the due date settings for the underlying task definition.

  • Updated Create Task API

    The APEX_APPROVAL.CREATE_TASK API now includes a due date parameter. When specified, this value will override the due date settings for the underlying task definition.

Additional Updates and Enhancements

  • New Color Picker

    The old JET color picker has been replaced in the APEX Theme Roller, Page Designer, and IR/IG Highlights with a new web component based color picker. This color picker can be created dynamically and has the same settings as the old color picker with a JET color compatible object.

  • REST-Enabled Objects

    REST-enabling functionality for database objects has been removed from the APEX Object Browser and placed under APEX RESTful Services. Users can now create and modify RESTful services from the RESTful Enabled Objects page.

  • Accessibility Improvements

    Plain text attributes have been updated to properly escape HTML and ARIA attributes and prevent HTML markup from being exposed to screen readers.

  • Adopted TinyMCE

    The TinyMCE JavaScript Library has been added and is now the base for the Rich Text Editor as CKEditor has been deprecated.

  • JavaScript Library Upgrades

    We've updated several JavaScript libraries to newer releases including Oracle JET 14.0.0, FullCalendar 5.11.3, PrismJS 1.29.0, MarkedJS 4.2.5, DOMPurify 2.4.3, CKEditor5 36.0.0, Terser 5.16.1, CSSO 5.0.5, Cropper.js 1.5.13, and MapLibre 2.4.0.

Explore Previous Releases

View Release Notes