Narmadha D

Three Small APEX 26.1 Features That Made My Day Easier Footer for inline dialogs, count badges on buttons, and message Dynamic Actions FR-3447 FR-2287 FR-2573 When the APEX 26.1 release notes came out, I was mostly looking at the big AI stuff. But then I noticed three little feature requests that got delivered, and these are the exact things I have been fighting with for years. So I sat down, tried all of them on a test page, and I want to share what worked and what tripped me up. Nothing fancy here, just real day to day developer pain that finally got fixed. FR-3447 Footer for inline dialog and inline drawer This one is my favorite because it is so simple but it bugged me for a long time. When you build a normal modal page dialog or a page drawer, you can drop a Button Container region into the footer and your Save and Cancel buttons sit nicely at the bottom. But the inline dialog and inline drawer neve...

AI Structured Outputs in APEX 26.1 Building a Smart Ticket Triage page that gets clean JSON back from AI, not messy text. For a long time I wanted AI inside my APEX pages to give me back clean data and not a big paragraph of text that I have to read and clean up myself. In APEX 26.1 this is finally possible. The feature is called structured outputs. You hand APEX_AI.GENERATE a JSON Schema, and the AI returns JSON in exactly that shape every time. To try it out I built a small page I call Smart Ticket Triage. You paste a support message, press a button, and the page fills in the category, priority, sentiment, a short summary and a few tags. In this post I will walk through how I built it, and I will be honest about the parts that did not work on the first try. What this feature actually does Before 26.1 you could ask the AI to reply with JSON, but it was never fully safe. Sometimes it added a sentence before the JSON, sometimes it wrapped it in code fences, and then your p...

Trying the New APEX 26.1 AI Providers, for Free, with Gemini and Mistral One of the features I was itching to try in APEX 26.1 was the expanded Generative AI Service support. Earlier versions only gave us OpenAI, Cohere, and OCI, but 26.1 opened the door to a whole new set of providers. I wanted to see how little effort it really takes, and I wanted to do it without spending a rupee. So I picked the two providers that have genuine free tiers, Google Gemini and Mistral AI, and wired both into the same little app. Here is exactly how it went. What I set out to build I kept the goal deliberately small, because the point was to test the integration, not to build a product. One page with a box to type a question, a button, and an area that fills in with the answer from the model. That is enough to prove the round trip works, and once it does, everything bigger is just variations on the same idea. The part I was most curious about was whether switching from one provider to another w...

Oracle APEX / Technique Stamping a watermark across an APEX page There is no checkbox for this in APEX, and that is exactly why it makes a fun little build. Here is how I put a CONFIDENTIAL watermark over a report with nothing but a few lines of CSS. I had a page full of customer data the other day and I wanted it to visibly read CONFIDENTIAL without bolting on a plugin or touching the data. My first instinct was to go looking for a watermark attribute somewhere in Page Designer. Watermark in APEX is not a feature you switch on, it is a small pattern you assemble, and once you see how the pieces fit it takes about five minutes. So I went down the rabbit hole, and this post is the clean version of what I landed on: a simple overlay, the one gotcha that will trip you up, and a couple of ways to take it further. Here is the end result we are working toward. Preview / the finished effect Employees Interactive Report ...

Oracle APEX 26.1 List Link Attributes and Menu Buttons Two small things landed in APEX 26.1 that I now use all the time. One lets a List put your own attributes on each link. The other turns a plain button into a tidy drop down menu. Here is what they do and how I built a quick demo for each one. 01 Introduction I have been going through the Oracle APEX 26.1 features one by one and writing down what I find. This post is the next one in that run. This time it is about two small changes, one for Lists and one for Buttons. I will show what each one does and then walk through a small demo for both, step by step. 02 Why it helps What this used to take Before 26.1, if I wanted one list link to open in a new tab, or carry a small data value for a click, I had to edit template attributes or write extra JavaScript. And when I had five related actions, I added five buttons and the page started to look...