Oracle APEX Shared Components Menu Button
With around 20 years on the job, Matt is one of the most experienced software developers at Pretius. He likes meeting new people, traveling to conferences, and working on different projects.
He’s also a big sports fan (regularly watches Leeds United, Formula 1, and boxing), and not just as a spectator – he often starts his days on a mountain bike, to tune his mind.
If you have an idea how to make Oracle APEX better - then you should submit your idea here https://apex.oracle.com/ideas
The team regularly meet to discuss the ideas and your idea could become part of the next version of APEX. There is a lot of competition for features, some take more effort than others, so if you have an idea - be prepared for a thorough review of your idea. If it gets rejected, no biggie, just keep those idea juices flowing and help contributing.
I contributed an idea a while ago (please feel free to upvote it!!) - and whilst it didn't make APEX 26.1 this time - its not personal, lots of tough decisions need to be made. My idea is still on the Roadmap and I hope it will be delivered soon.
So the idea is to make the Shared Components button a Menu Button. I tried to be brief in the text - as I didn't want to influence the design of it.
Hopefully the idea will become a reality - maybe (hopefully) there will be some better ideas published ahead of this that we will all enjoy more.
Although, I thought I could create a tampermonkey script to preview what it could look like. After some work; I came up with something for APEX 26.1 that works just great.
As you can see the Shared Components button is now a Menu Button. You click once then navigate where you want. You can navigate to Shared Components or you can navigate to a sub page.
Here are some things that were interesting during development
The menu is a list of links, headings and separators
The headings can only be disabled as there is no destination.
I did my best to support the Shared Component Icons on the headings, but since they are disabled, the Icon looks rather faded
The Shared Components / Shapes button appeared in way more places in APEX than I imagined - I hope I captured them all
Secret Feature: If you hold Control/Command (Windows/Mac) whilst clicking, you can open the menu entry in a new browswer tab. This was one of my annoyances that clicking the Shared Components button navigated you away from Page Designer
In fact there is a native solution to this... I have an extension link set up to shared components - and this opens in another tab
you can set this up like this
If you want to access Shared Components menu entries direct from the Developer Bar - then you need Pretius Developer Tool plugin
I didn't use the submenus above in the tampermonkey script, it was getting a bit chaotic.
In the future, possibly I can add more links like documentation, APEX Shortcuts etc to this tampermonkey script.
If you want this functionality, just use the below instructions
Instructions
Install Tampermonkey Browser Extension
Click Browser Extension > Right Click > Create a new Script
Paste over the starter script with this script
Ctrl + S to save
Refresh your browser
Want more mods? my full set of mods can be found here
ENJOY!
What's the picture? Another view of the beautiful rose gardens at Royal House, Harrogate. Visit Yorkshire
