Book Image

Oracle Application Express 4.0 with Ext JS

By : Mark Lancaster
Book Image

Oracle Application Express 4.0 with Ext JS

By: Mark Lancaster

Overview of this book

Modern web-based applications are moving rapidly away from simple HTML pages, with users expecting desktop styled rich internet applications. Oracle Application Express includes multiple built-in interfaces especially designed for adding JavaScript libraries and components. Ext JS is a polished, high performance set of customizable UI widgets with a well designed and extensible Component model. Combining Ext JS components with the well engineered server side processing provided by Oracle APEX is a recipe for success. Written by Oracle ACE, Mark Lancaster, this book is a complete practical guide to building robust desktop-styled web applications using Oracle Application Express and the powerful Ext JS JavaScript library This book starts off by setting up a productive environment for Oracle APEX and Ext JS, preparing you to get ready to code, and then gradually introducing you to the Ext JS API. You then create a theme based on Ext JS into APEX from scratch, starting with integrating the Ext JS library into the page template, then covering all the template types. You further enrich your interface by integrating Ext JS form components and Ext JS layout elements. You are shown how to integrate components including tab panels, toolbars and menus. Existing components are also enhanced, transforming select lists into auto-completing combo boxes and text-areas auto-sizing as you type.Using exciting new Plug-ins feature, you will learn how to develop custom APEX components that can be used declaritively. This book extends native APEX functionality by integrating Ext JS widgets and components with integrated server-side JavaScript generation, AJAX processing and validation.The book then covers integrating Plug-ins with APEX provided Dynamic Actions JavaScript. You proceed further to build advanced interactive components using AJAX enabled trees and grids. Then you will see how to use the iFrames component along with page templates to build a multi-page interface and also deal with JavaScript communication between iFrames. Finally, you will integrate Ext JS with jQuery using the Ext jQuery adaptor. This book also covers examples of jQuery functionality interacting with Ext JS. By the end of this book you will also learn to improve the performance of your JavaScripts.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Oracle Application Express 4.0 with Ext JS
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Modal popup windows


Creating popup windows is a straightforward process of opening another browser window using the JavaScript window.open() command. APEX does this for Popup LOV items, the legacy datepicker, and within Application Builder for online help, to name a few examples.

The challenging issue with popup windows is you can't make them modal in any standard way across the major browsers. The second issue with popup windows is that you cannot completely hide the browser "chrome", or border components of a web browser window, which includes window frames, menus, toolbars, and scroll bars.

The modal Ext.Window with an embedded iFrame page, shown in the previous screenshot, neatly solves both of these issues and gives a more polished-looking solution at the same time.

In this example, clicking on the edit link for the Interactive Report launches the modal popup window to edit the user details. Once the details are updated, clicking the Apply Changes button submits the page for processing...