This week, we return to the Hidden Gems series. This gem isn’t very hidden–you’re likely to have seen it a lot already–but it’s easy to overlook the power that it provides. I’m talking about the lowly developer toolbar.
The toolbar in APEX 4.x was fairly straightforward, but I rarely used it. (In all honesty, I just logged into a 4.2.6 environment just to see what options were available, because I couldn’t remember!) The only options I ever used were the Debug/View Debug entries, because the others either weren’t useful or didn’t work well with a two-window setup. When I opened the application in a different tab than the APEX Builder, I wanted to keep the two separate–and the various edit/create options in the developer toolbar stomped all over those desires. In 5.0, that’s been fixed.
The first three options in the 5.0 toolbar remain the same as the old 4.x one, except they now know where your Builder session is and update that window, even switching your active tab for you. Much better than before, and actually useful.
The View Debug and Debug options also function pretty much the same as they always have, but there’s a new Session option as well which functions similarly to the View Debug option–it opens a new window where you can examine the current session state for your application, including any collections that you’ve created. Useful when you’re trying to track down a bug and want to confirm that the APEX session state (not the DOM session state!) matches what you think it should be.
Show Grid is interesting, and can be useful for lining things up properly in the Universal Theme, but I honestly don’t use it much at all.
The final three options are all new, and are where the really cool stuff happens.
Quick Edit is, in my opinion, one of the best productivity enhancements in 5.0. Clicking on it changes your mouse to a crosshair; moving the crosshair over the page will highlight individual regions, buttons, or items. When the one you want to edit is highlighted, click on it and APEX will switch you to your Builder tab and automatically navigate the page designer directly to the component you selected. I use this all the time.
Theme Roller is where you can change the look and feel of your Universal Theme application to match your requirements, and is really, really powerful. I’m looking forward to using it to customize WriteTrack. Of course, it’s not something you’re likely to be using often; once you’ve got your apps styled, you’re only rarely going to be making changes. But it’s right there and you can see what your changes look like as you make them.
The final option looks like a gear; this lets you change how the toolbar is displayed. Don’t want it in your face until you need it? Set it to auto-hide. Feel the text version is too wide (especially for non-modal windows)? Set it to Icons only. Prefer to have it somewhere other than the bottom of the window? Yeah, you can change that now, too. Play around with it and find what works best for you.
APEX 5.0 has taken a part of APEX that I largely ignored and turned it into something I use all the time. Take a look–you may find it doing the same for you!
Quick Edit is buggy and on 5.1.1 simply it dose not work (well not how I thought it would) IMHO it is a backwards step on the edit tabs you had on htmldb 2 onwards.
The problem with the new interface is that almost every aspect of it seems to be change for change sake. I have yet to find anything that increases productivity.
to me the apex 5 interface is a bit like the “upgrades” between word versions we must make something different so lets tinker with the interface.
I am dreading the loss of component view. It works well and is much more intuitive than the new views. They have just crammed too much onto a single screen that you have to search for everything.
Not impressed.
Bjorn,
I use Quick Edit a lot, and haven’t had any issues with it, other than sometimes not being able to grab the exact column I want to edit (and instead having to select the region and then click through to the column). What issues have you been having?