In the past i loved to switch from the components view to the tree view when developing APEX applications.
In ODTUG i got a first impression to the new page designer. Now on the DOAG 2013 conference Patrick Wolf gave an update in some features.
In the Page Designer it's possible to edit multiple items with one action. Simply select 2 or more Items then you can edit some of the attributes which are from same type in all items.
Patrick edited the label alignment from 3 fields in one step.
The whole Page Designer works very fast, when the page is loaded at first. After that the whole changes are made on client-side and will be saved the user clicks on the save button. Every step which is done, can be undone with the new undo feature. To test the page it has to be saved or click an run and it will also be saved automatically.
Another interesting feature is, when adding a region the columns for a sql query based on select * from emp are directly show in the region.
Further on inline code validation will be a part from APEX 5.0.
It's really cool to have completion in the different areas. This completion also supports the apex item namens and the packages and functions in the database. Another completion type which is in a testing phase could be the code template completion.
Another interesting feature is the possibility to duplicate an apex component on one side. So you can create a component and fill with some settings and duplicate that component. All components inside this component will also be copied (Region will also copy the items and buttons inside).
As a hint patrick told me that it could be possible out of the box, that pages will be run in new tabs when editing a page.
Other new features like the handling for static files are changed to support multiple files to upload, versioning in these files and folder structure to use relative links.
Modal Pages can be defined very easily. The attribute page mode in the page attribute has to be set to modal and than automatically all links to that page will open this page as a modal page by using an iframe. At the moment it's not possible to run that page directly, but the apex team still works on that feature.
A new calendar will be added and the Interactive Report can use pivot out of the box.
APEX 5.0 will be released in 2014 and another Patchset for APEX 4 is in work and will be released before APEX 5.0.
