Yes, I’m finally back. The last post was written right before a complete period of being offline, during that time it was scheduled to be published. Followed that was slow recovery. I have been deemed fully recovered for a while but not gotten back enough to find time to blog. That changes now. So what causes almost a half years time to recover. Going out with the trash. Yes, it really is dangerous and should be avoided at all costs. What was really dangerous was the part of falling and acquiring a serious concussion. That was not made any better when I fell again a week later to get another severe concussion. I strongly advise against acquiring even mild concussions.
I’ll finish up this series about help texts with customized help text. The dedicated, in-line, modal, and non modal variants I’ve covered has all been declarative. Now we’ll take a look at what can be done if we want to not just modify with how it is shown to the user, but how it also looks.
For this blog I used version 5.1.4.00.08 of APEX on apex.oracle.com.
As I’ve stated before, my preferred way to deal with help text in APEX applications is to do it with inline help as the this blog post discussed. I have honestly never had to use this custom version in any real application. I imagine a lot can be done with just customizing CSS to make the help text show as one ants. But I guess for a customer that really want to control this, this option may come in handy.
There is a procedure provided with APEX for this. It is APEX_APPLICATION.HELP. it has this signature (taken from the linked documentation).
p_request IN VARCHAR2 DEFAULT NULL, p_flow_id IN VARCHAR2 DEFAULT NULL, p_flow_step_id IN VARCHAR2 DEFAULT NULL, p_show_item_help IN VARCHAR2 DEFAULT 'YES', p_show_regions IN VARCHAR2 DEFAULT 'YES', p_before_page_html IN VARCHAR2 DEFAULT '<p>', p_after_page_html IN VARCHAR2 DEFAULT NULL, p_before_region_html IN VARCHAR2 DEFAULT NULL, p_after_region_html IN VARCHAR2 DEFAULT'</td></tr></table></p>', p_before_prompt_html IN VARCHAR2 DEFAULT '<p><b>', p_after_prompt_html IN VARCHAR2 DEFAULT '</b></p>: ', p_before_item_html IN VARCHAR2 DEFAULT NULL, p_after_item_html IN VARCHAR2 DEFAULT NULL
p_request is not used.
p_flow_id and p_step_id is application id and page id respectively.
p_show_item_help controls if help about individual items should be shown.
P_show_regions controls if information about each regions should be shown.
The remaining parameters have one before and one after parameter of each kind. The control what html we want to have injected before or after a certain element on the page.
p_xxxxxx_page_html controls what is put before the page info and what is put after the whole help text (the page info is considered to include regions and items).
The remaining parameters are conditional, such that the content is ignored when one of p_show_item_info and p_show_regions is set to something other than ‘YES’.
p_show_reqions has to be YES for these to be considered:
- p_before_region_html
- p_after_region_html
They control what HTML to inject before and after each region help text.
p_show_item_help has top be yes for these to be considered:
- p_before_promt_html
- p_after_prompt_html
- p_before_item_html
- p_after_item_html
The prompt ones controls what is injected before and after the label for each page item. The item parameters control what is injected before and after the actual help text for each item.
Rather than describing how to build this, I recommend that you look at it on my demo application. The demo application allows you to play with all the above parameters and see the effect it has.
Watch it live
Take a minute and check out this live in my demo application to see for yourself how this can be used. Log in with demo/demo.