Beginning Oracle® Application Express

7.2. User Interface Defaults

The pages that the APEX wizards generate provide a fairly complete set of capabilities for interacting with your data. The wizards use information in the data dictionary, which holds information about the structures in the database, to create the appropriate field types and labels for the items in your pages.

But, as you already saw, sometimes the default assumptions made by the APEX wizards are not exactly what you want. In the last section, you changed the labels for all of the fields for the CUSTOMERS table — but you only changed them on one page. In other places where the data from that table is referenced, the automatic labels still exist, and you would have to find each of them and change them by hand.

In a real development process, though, you have the ability to change those defaults before ever generating a single page.

Try It Out: Changing User Interface Defaults The APEX page that allows you to change default attributes for a data column can be accessed from several different places, including the Shared Components page and links from some attribute pages. Since the user defaults are connected with distinct columns, for the purposes of this section, you can get to them from the SQL Browser. Go to the SQL Workshop and bring up the Object Browser to browse Tables. Click on the PRODUCTS table and then on the UI defaults button to bring up the page shown in Figure 7-10. The contents of the right panel now contain a partial list of the user interface ...