Friday, February 07, 2014

APEX 5.0 (EA): Feedback Page

One of the first things I do when creating a new application is enabling the feedback mechanism in combination with Team Development.

Click the Create Page button in Application Builder and select "Feedback Page":


The next step looks like this:


The Page Mode can now be set to Modal, so instead of a popup it will render as a modal.

Note that in the EA1 version there are some known issues with the Feedback Page, which will be resolved in one of the next iterations of EA.

One issue made me think that once I upgraded my applications to APEX 5.0 I probably want to start searching for "apex.navigation.popup.url" and change those to become the native APEX 5.0 modal windows. It's those "small" things like declarative modal windows which make a big difference in development effort and clean code. But more on modal windows in a dedicated post.

I love the Feedback mechanism and how it integrates with Team Development, but if it had one more feature, I would be thrilled. It's great to know session state, it's great people can add a comment, but sometimes a picture shows more than a 1000 words. So if we could click a button that took a screen capture and we could annotate that... wouldn't that be awesome? The result would be an image with the feedback in Team Development.

Some of us in the community build some custom solutions to do that. For example Martin and I "hacked something together" for the OSN-competition at OOW which did the screen capture and annotation, but having such a feature native in APEX and integrated with Team Development would be even better :)

5 comments:

Martin said...

I'm using ApEx 5.0.4. I'm unable to change Page Mode from the Create Blank Page dialog. It's defaulted to Normal, and there is no drop-down.

P.S. I've been following you from the days of HTML DB and have really appreciate your huge contribution to the community.

Thanks,

Martin

Dimitri Gielis said...

Hi Martin,

Thanks for the kind words.

If you go to your feedback page and you look at the page details - look for Page Mode: that you can change to Modal Dialog for example.

Hope that works,
Dimitri

Martin said...

Thanks Dimitri. Unfortunately Page Mode is disabled for Feedback pages also. I'm pretty sure it's due to my two-level tab navigation. Completely redesigning my application to no longer use two-level tabs seems like too big of a project.

Thanks Again,

Martin

CJR said...

Hi there.
APEX 5.1.4.
Is there any chance to look at the feedback comments in a custom page instead of navigating to the Workspace/Team Development tab. The thing is, I need some users to have access to look at the feedback Report TAB only. I figured out that the built in APEX app/page is something like "f?p=4800:8000:" but I could not get the way to copy that page to any custom page.
Hope to be clear!!
Thanx in advance, I'll keep surfing the web to get a workaround.

Dimitri Gielis said...

When you include the Feature in new versions of APEX you have the option to have an Admin page.
It will show the feedback in your APEX app.