What's New in Oracle APEX 21.2
Smart Filters
Smart Filters is a new search component that allows users to quickly narrow data down with filters suggestions or search terms. Developers can use this component to provide users with a simplified search experience that eliminates clutter and provides a single control to instantly find the information they are looking for.
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Powerful Search Bar
Smart Filters features a powerful new search bar that provides built-in auto-complete for your filters, supports searching for multiple terms, and provides easy keyboard navigation.
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Search Suggestions
Search suggestions are at the heart of Smart Filters. These suggestions are based on the filters you have defined and are displayed as you type, or as chips below the search bar.
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Suggestion Chips
Filters are evaluated against your data and displayed below the search bar as chips, suggesting the top search filters most appropriate for your data set.
Progressive Web Apps
Your APEX apps can easily be defined as Progressive Web Apps (PWA) to take advantage of advanced caching and improved performance. These apps can also be installed on your smartphone of choice with device-specific installation instructions.
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Improved App Performance
Progressive Web Apps are faster apps. They leverage a special browser cache to store resources more efficiently, resulting in faster page load times. This works even without having to install the app!
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Make your APEX application installable
Your APEX application is worthy of being on a device home screen. Give your users the ability to install your app seamlessly.
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Custom Offline Page
The web isn’t typically very good at dealing with offline connections. An APEX PWA offers at least a customizable offline fallback page.
Universal Theme & UI Updates
Take greater control over your application's user interface with additional component positions across page templates, modal dialog drawers, improved accessibility, smoother page loading, and much more!
The updated Reference App now provides live Template Option previews, documented CSS variables, and a new Theme Version menu in the header to quickly jump to Reference Apps for previous versions of the Universal Theme.
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Greater Flexibility in Page Layouts
Enjoy greater control and flexibility over the positioning of page components than ever before. Now you can build more complex page layouts and arrange different types of page components adjacent to each other, or position them anywhere on the page!
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Modal Dialog Drawers
There is a new template to render both page and region modal dialogs that can slide in from the sides of your screen, maximizing screen real estate and providing an entirely new user experience for auxiliary actions.
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Accessibility Improvements
Universal Theme improves accessibility across the board with appropriate aria-* attributes, more semantic markup, and enhancements that provide a better experience with screen readers.
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Faster Page Rendering
Several improvements in page rendering speed and reduced UI flickering yield a smoother page load experience.
New and Updated Components
Faceted Search Enhancements
Faceted search now has declarative support for multi-value columns, has improved accessibility, and gives you more control over how a facet is displayed.
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Multi-Value Facets
Easily create facets for multi-value columns stored as a separated string or a JSON array. Watch Video (2:41)
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Additional UI Controls
You can now control whether a facet label is displayed for a given facet when filtered. You can also specify an icon that is displayed next to Facet label within the Faceted Search region.
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Accessibility Improvements
There are numerous improvements to make faceted search more usable and accessible.
Updated Alert and Confirm Dialogs
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Customizable Dialogs
The Alert and Confirm dialogs now have an updated appearance and provide customization options for easily specifying the style, title, icon, and even custom button labels.
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Support for Template Directives
The dialog message supports HTML template directives, including client-side substitutions of item references for truly dynamic alerts.
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Button Confirmation
You can also trigger a confirmation dialog for any Button by simply toggling the "Require Confirmation" property.
Geocoding and Map Items
Geocoding your addresses has never been easier, and you can even display a map as a page item! The best part is that you don't need an API key!
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Geocoding and Address Normalization
This new page item that provides a list of possible matches to choose from when a user starts typing an address, and returns the coordinates as well as the normalized address.
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Display Mini Maps
The new Display Map item type enables you to quickly visualize a single coordinate on a map, ideal for displaying next to address information. Watch Video (1:49)
REST Catalogs and Improvements
Users can now search and browse through a catalog that contains metadata about REST Services and create APEX REST Data Sources based on REST Service metadata within the catalog. In addition, there is built-in pagination support for Simple HTTP REST Data Sources.
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Share Catalogs Across Apps
REST Service Catalogs are part of the APEX workspace and are available for use by apps within it.
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Easy Export and Import
Catalogs can easily be exported to a single file and import into other workspaces.
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URL-based Updating
You can quickly refresh catalogs by pointing to a URL of a catalog export file.
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Pagination Support for REST Services
Simple HTTP REST Data Sources can now support pagination schemes enabling pagination in APEX components. Watch Video (3:54)
Improved Report Downloads, Subscriptions, and Printing
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Images in Report Downloads
Image columns are now supported for downloaded reports where they will be embedded in the PDF, XLSX, or HTML export file. Watch Video (1:32)
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Download Dialog Improvements
The download dialog now provides an option to "Strip Rich Text". In addition, the PDF accessibility property is now stored as a user preference.
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Interactive Report Subscriptions
Interactive Report Subscriptions now support all download formats, no longer send any email if no rows were found.
Developer Experience
Improved Editors
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Static File Editor
Allows developers to create, edit and rename static application, workspace, plug-in, and theme files without the need to re-upload the file each time. The feature also includes automatic minification of JavaScript and CSS files, and compilation of LESS files. Watch Video (1:56)
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Improved Breadcrumb Editor
Improved editing experience in Shared Components that provides multiple conditional breadcrumb entries for a page.
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Run Larger SQL in SQL Commands
SQL Commands now supports more than 32k characters. Removed previous limitation of not being able to edit columns that are longer than 32KB. - Support large SQL code chunks greater than 32KB for page submit and SQL Commands.
Environment Setup
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Environment Banners
Easily tell apart different APEX environments by configuring an Environment Banner at the instance or workspace level (Manage Service → Define Environment Banner).
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SAML Authentication
SAML is now a supported authentication scheme that you can configure for both the APEX development environment as well as your own apps from within Administration Services.
Email and Email Template Enhancements
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Email Template Support for Send Email Process
The Send Email page process now supports Email Templates with declarative substitutions. Watch Video (2:55)
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Email Support in Automations
Send Email can now be used for Automations.
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Copy Email Templates
Now you can easily copy email templates.
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Inline Email Attachments
Inline image attachments for email
Additional Features
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Data Packager
Easily migrate applications from one instance to another and include data in tables. Specify a table or a list of tables for which the data gets exported with an application. Watch Video
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Popup LOV Set Display Value
Set value (Dynamic Action or apex.item.setValue) will now automatically populate the display value, and additional outputs (if defined).
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New Date Picker 'Show-On' attribute
Date Picker now has a 'Show On' attribute, to control when the calendar popup display.
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New Modal Dialog Event
New "Dialog Closed or Canceled" event will fire if a user presses the Escape key or the X button in the dialog.
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Copyright Banner in App Exports
Now you can define a copyright banner for your application exports.
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New PL/SQL APIs
There's now apex_debug.get_page_view_id and apex_debug.get_last_message_id to link messages written by LOGGER to an APEX debug session and show LOGGER messages in the right order.
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New JavaScript APIs
New APIs for mapRegion, facetsRegion, apex.date, apex.items, apex.regions and apex.env
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Build APEX Apps in 21 Additional Languages
The Runtime Engine of APEX is now available in a total of 31 languages, including English, Español, suomi, Français, Français (Canada), עברית, Hrvatski, magyar, Italiano, 日本語, 한국어, Nederlands, Norsk, polski, Português (Portugal), Português (Brasil), Română, Русский, Slovenčina, Slovenščina, српски, Svenska, ไทย, Türkçe, 中文（简体）, 中文 (繁體), العربية, čeština, Dansk, Deutsch, Ελληνικά! Watch Video (2:12)
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JavaScript Library Upgrades
We've updated several JavaScript libraries to newer releases including Oracle JET 11, jQuery 3.6.0, PrismJS 1.24.1, MarkedJS 3.0.0 and more.