My top 5 APEX 18.1 Plug-ins

With every new version of Oracle Application Express (APEX) new features are added and the life of a developer is made even easier. If the feature set is not enough or you see you need to build the same functionality more often, you can always extend APEX with plug-ins.

There are six different types of plug-ins: dynamic action, item,  region, process, authentication scheme and authorization scheme.

Plug-ins are absolutely fantastic to extend the native functionalities of APEX in a declarative way. The APEX plug-in becomes a declarative option in the APEX Builder and has the [Plug-in] text next to it. In the next screenshot, you see the dynamic actions being extended by two Plug-ins.

If you are searching for an APEX plug-in, I typically go to APEX World > Plug-ins. The nice thing about that site is that the plug-ins seem to be maintained, so if a plug-in is not supported anymore it gets the status deprecated.

!! And here lays the catch with using plug-ins. When you decide to use a plug-in in your project, you become responsible for this and need to make sure it's compatible with every release of Oracle APEX. Many plug-ins are open source and many plug-in developers maintain their plug-ins, but it's really important you understand that at the end you are responsible for things you put in your application. If the plug-in is not secure or it breaks in the next release of APEX, you need to find a solution. So use plug-ins with care and see for example how many likes the plug-in has or what the comments are about the plug-in or author. Oracle is not reviewing or supporting the plug-ins !!

When I saw the tweet of Travis, I thought to do a blog post on my top 5 plug-ins I use in almost every project.

Here we go:

1. Built with love using Oracle APEX

I'm proud to built applications with Oracle Application Express, and this plug-in makes it very clear :) At the bottom of the app, you will see this text:

Note that in Oracle APEX 18.1 this text in included by default and you don't even need to add the plug-in. Nevertheless, I wanted to include it in this list as it should be there in every app, even the ones built before APEX 18.1 :)

2. Select2

When a select list (or drop-down) has many values, it takes too long to find the right value. Select2 makes it easy to search for values, it also supports lazy loading and multiple select.

3. APEX Office Print

APEX Office Print extends APEX so it becomes possible to export to native Excel files and generate documents in Word, Powerpoint, PDF, HTML and Text, all based on your own template. It has many more features, I blogged about some before.

4. Dropzone

APEX 18.1 has declarative multi-file upload, but still, I love the Dropzone plug-in developed by Daniel Hochleitner. You can drag multiple files from your desktop straight in your APEX app. Daniel is one of my favorite plug-in developers. When he releases something, you know it will be good.

5. Modal LOV

This is a newer plug-in and I haven't used it that much yet, but I'm sure I will do. The nice thing with this item type plug-in is that it also supports Interactive Grid. Where Select2 stays within the page, this Modal LOV comes with a modal list of values (pop-up) which is great if you want to show multiple columns or need more context for the record you need to select.

There are many more plug-ins out there, most of them work on APEX 5.x and upwards. For example, Pretius has some cool plug-ins too, the one to create nested reports I recently used in a project. Another site you can find plug-ins is APEX-Plugin.com.