A new version of Oracle’s Application Express tools has been released. The changes to version 4.1 are mainly fairly minor, but are they good enough to make it worth upgrading?

A new version of Oracle’s Application Express tools has been released. Apex, as the tools are known, can be used with Oracle’s commercial and free databases. The changes to version 4.1 are mainly fairly minor, but are still good enough to make it worth upgrading.

Form and table handling has been improved in a number of ways. You can now give your users a way to paste data from spreadsheets into tables within your apps, and you can also reference column values using bind syntax to make it easier to process data and carry out validations. If you’re writing applications for mobile devices, the improved support for mobile frameworks means you can render forms without the need to use HTML tables. Websheets have also been improved. Websheets are collections of forms and reports designed for the web, and Apex automatically handles the creation of tables, triggers, and sequences. The controls for websheets have been redesigned in this new version.

Another change to the new version is better error handling. In the previous release you were limited to showing the error code, but in this version you can intercept the error codes and replace the default message with more comprehensible text.

You can try out Apex 4.1 at the Apex website.

If you would like to be informed about new articles on I Programmer you can either follow us on Twitter or Facebook or you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter.