Oracle Apex - Adding Region Help

Oracle APEX Help Text

Occasionally at work I build systems using Oracle's Application Express and I find I have to stop the web developer within me from going overboard and solving problems in a non APEX way. We had just completed a new system for managing customer discounts and had asked the system owner to come up with field and page help for the application. After a few days we received a spreadsheet full of descriptions and help for most of the pages, but to my surprise they'd included region help. The latter being something that isn't currently implemented in vanilla APEX.

Just to explain a little for those not conversant in APEX, systems are built from a number of pages, and each page can be essentially a report or form. You can have a mix of these by using regions, but as everything must be in a region anyway it's really a case of adding extra regions. Additionally it can be beneficial to split forms across multiple regions to aid clarity or group by function. The following example shows percentage fields used to capture discount percentages for a customer.

Standard Form Region in APEX.

Item help has already been added to this region and this can be seen by clicking one of the labels. This runs a JQuery function called 'popupFieldHelp' and generates a fancy popup like this example.

Item Help Example.

So far all perfectly normal, there's nothing new here!

Additionally these items appear on the Page Help, grouped together under a section title that matches their region title.

What About Region Help?

So everything was great until we were asked for a region help, but as the requirement was valid I couldn't just discard the idea. But I didn't want to write custom JQuery code because my non-developer colleague may need to update it, and I also wanted it to appear in the page help. Here's what I came up with...

1. Add a 'Display Only' page item to your region and choose a sensible name.

(In our example this will be 'P19_ADDITIONAL_DISCOUNTS_HELP').

2. Set the Label text to reference the region name, to be shown in the page help.

(I used 'Additional Discounts Region' for my label.)

3. Add the help text to the item in the normal way entering your region help text.

4. Move the item so that it is first in the region and run the page.

5. Test your new help text by clicking on the item label, then right click it and copy the link code.

(nb. In Firefox this is 'Copy Link Location' and in Internet Explorer it is 'Copy Shortcut'.)

6. Paste the link code into Notepad (or similar) and you should have something like this..

javascript:popupFieldHelp('3439324541165905','112943106205802')

(nb. The first number is your item number, the second is the session number)

7. Edit the region and alter the title to..

<a class="uHelpLink" href="javascript:popupFieldHelp ('xxxxxxxxx','&APP_SESSION.')">Additional Discounts</a>

Where xxxxxxxxx is your item number that we found in the previous stage.

8. Save and run the page and your title will now show as a link (see image below).

Region Help Linked To Region Title.

9. Click the title link and check it works.

10. Finally edit the page again and set the item to 'Hidden' so that it's label no longer shows in the region.

(nb. The item help box will now be hidden when editing the item, but it's still there and available to page and item popup help functions.)

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Update, 20/01/2015 Method adapted for tabular form columns.