Over the weekend, we rolled out the next iteration of our new Create App Wizard extension (read about the first version here). As before, this is available for testing on apex.oracle.com.
One of the first changes we made in this version is to make the link easier to find. When you click on the Create Application link, you’ll now see four large options: a new Blueprint one, and the three old ones (Desktop, Mobile, and Websheet). Click on Blueprint to be taken to the new wizard.
Blueprints
The first time you run this, you’ll see two links above the “Create an Application” heading: About this preview release, and a new View Blueprint option. If you click on this second option, you’ll be presented with a JSON-formatted definition for the application, which you can edit directly; when you hit “Apply Blueprint”, the wizard will update to include any changes you’ve made. This will make it easy to save and/or share application templates, since you can just copy and paste the appropriate JSON.
However, we took it a step further–after you create an application from a blueprint, if you go back into the Create App wizard, you’ll see another link at the top: Load Blueprint. This lets you pull in the definition of an app you’ve previously created, tweak it, and then re-create it.
Master Detail Pages
We’ve added a new page type that can be created: the Master Detail. These pages look (and act) similar to an email application, with a list of master records on the left side; clicking on one pulls up its data, as well as the details of any (selected) tables with a foreign key into that table. There are a lot of moving parts on this page, so it’s not something I’d want to create from scratch each time. When you define the Master Detail page, you select a table to build it on, and then you can select additional detail tables based on which tables have a foreign key to the first table. Almost everything else is auto-magically generated for you, including the ability to filter the entries on the left side and edit pages for the master and detail records.
Other Features
We’ve added some other features as well, most notably the options under Advanced Settings at the bottom of the wizard. They’re not things that you’ll use often (probably), but they’re nice to have for when you want/need them. We’ve also got the framework in place for the created apps to be translated into multiple languages, but currently this feature simply sets up the translation feature without actually translating the text (we hope to have this better in a future release), which means that you still need to export/import your XLIFF files manually.