jApex – A jQuery Plugin for APEX

In a previous post I proclaimed that jQuery Selectors Will Change Your Life.  While working on an AJAX centric APEX project, I wanted to use jQuery selectors to post data from an APEX page to an application process so I wrote a jQuery plugin. Over the course of this project the plugin has grown into something that I think the community would find useful.  Essentially it serves the same purpose as Carl Backstrom’s htmldb_get() function, but adds the power of jQuery selectors.  Carl was actually the one that introduced me to jQuery, and I’m sure he would have written something similar, only much better and in half the time.

I think the best way to introduce it is with a few quick examples.  I have a full set of working examples on apex.oracle.com here, but lets start with some simple examples to give you an idea of how it works.

APEX Items

The following code sends every item on an APEX page to the application process “SOME_APP_PROCESS”. It will then popup an alert with the results from the application process. Note that we did not have to specify each item individually, the jQuery selector (documented here) grabs them all.

var options = {
 appProcess: 'SOME_APP_PROCESS',
 pageItems: $(':input'),
 success:
   function(data){
     alert(data);
 }
};

$.jApex.ajax(options);

If we want to send all items inside a div with ID “employeeDiv” and send the results to the Firebug console:

var options = {
 appProcess: 'SOME_APP_PROCESS',
 pageItems: $('#employeeDiv :input'),
 success:
   function(data){
     console.log(data);
 }
};

$.jApex.ajax(options);

Want to send the items P1_NAME, P1_EMAIL, P1_PHONE?

var options = {
 appProcess: 'SOME_APP_PROCESS',
 pageItems: $('#P1_NAME, #P1_EMAIL, #P1_PHONE'),
 success:
   function(data){
   console.log(data);
 }
};

$.jApex.ajax(options);

Other Features

• You can also send data to the x01-x10 parameters.  There are several examples of this in my sample app.
• I had already written code to support sending arrays to the f01-f50 parameters used by Tabular Forms.  I really don’t like Tabular Forms and rarely, if ever use them.  However, I figured someone would want / request this functionality so I enhanced it a bit to better support Tabular Forms.  Keep in mind this functionality has not been tested much, so use at your own risk.

Tips

• $ is the alias for jQuery
• jQuery plugins almost always have 1 parameter that is object.  Each property of the object is analogous to a traditional JavaScript (or for that matter PL/SQL) parameter.
• Parameters  can be objects, arrays, scalars or even functions.  Most people are used to scalars, so passing a function in as parameter / property can really be confusing at first.

Download

You can download the jQuery plugin and the example APEX application here.