Upgrade to APEX 4.0 - Tabular Forms

It was a long time ago I promised this post, so finally today I found some time to finish the post.

In APEX 4.0 the Tabular Forms got enhanced quiet a lot. To make use of these enhancements it requires some manual changes of the page the tabular form is on, so when you upgrade your existing APEX 3.x (or older) applications the tabular forms are NOT upgraded automatically (or at least not completely), but they should still work like they did before.


The enhancement I want to discuss in this post is Adding a row to the tabular form.

Before APEX 4.0 when you hit the Add Row button, the page got submitted and a specific Add Rows process on the page got called.


In APEX 4.0 that changed: the page is not submitted anymore. When you hit the Add Row button, some javascript (addRow()) is called to add a new row to the tabular form.
So to make use of this enhancement, you need to make three changes:

1. Change the button to not Submit the page anymore, instead it should "Redirect to Url" with as Url target: javascript:addRow();
2. Delete the Apply MRU after submit processes (with the condition linked to the Add Row button): as the page is not submitted anymore when you click the Add Rows button it is not necessary to have that process anymore (obsolete)
   
3. Delete the Add Rows after submit processes (obsolete)

To identify the pages you have to change manually I use this query:

select WORKSPACE, APPLICATION_ID, APPLICATION_NAME, PAGE_ID, PAGE_NAME, PROCESS_NAME
from APEX_APPLICATION_PAGE_PROC
where PROCESS_TYPE in ('Multi Row Update','Add rows to tabular form')

It results in the below output and shows which pages you still have these processes on:


Another thing I found while upgrading my applications to APEX 4.0 related to tabular forms: if you still used an old template lay-out, the new functionality didn't work (missing of some tokens) and some other things which got already fixed in the 4.0.1 patch (see patch notes).