APEX Views are so useful

Oracle Application Express is getting more and more popular. A lot of people started to use it, even by some who are no real developers. They use APEX because it's helping them to do their "real job". And as with a lot of these "at-the-side" applications, the app becomes bigger and other people are starting to use it. Of course they are lucky as APEX can scale very well, but being a non-developer they hit at a certain time the limits or their technical capabilities and interest to make it an enterprise application.

On one of our projects we have to rebuild such an existing APEX application. There are a lot of pages in the application. In the requirements document there are screenshots of regions which need to be available in the new system. As you can imagine it can take a while to find a certain region.

Luckily, APEX is repository based, so all information of the application you find in a table. To make life easier, the APEX development team created APEX views on top of the APEX tables. You can compare it with the Oracle database itself where you have views on top of the x$ tables.

If you go to the Utilities tab in APEX, you'll see the APEX Views button (see screenshot above). If you click on that you'll get a nice screen with all the APEX views. You can also search for a view, for ex. I searched to get all APEX views that contain 'region'.

If you click on for ex the APEX Application Page Regions icon, you get all the details of the view and you can query it from there. You'll see the columns with explanation:


You have the possibility to select which columns you want to see when you run the query, which where clause you want to add and the query that will be run when you hit the go button.

It saved me a lot of time to find the regions I had to search for. A repository based system like APEX has so many advantages...