Translation enhancements in APEX 18 and 19

The Oracle Application Express (APEX) documentation summarizes the translation process thus:

"To translate an application developed in App Builder, you must map the primary and target language, seed and export text to a translation file, translate the text, apply the translation file, and publish the translated application."

When you go to Shared Components and then click "Translate Application", this process is illustrated by a list:

So the "default" approach is to download the XLIFF file and use a third-party tool to do the translation by editing that file.

However, it is also possible to edit the translations directly from within APEX. Click on "Translation Repository" under Translation Utilities to access this editor.

A few simple, but very useful enhancements have been made to the Translation Repository pages in the last couple of APEX versions.

 In APEX 19, there is now a new column available called "Translated" which indicates whether the original string has been translated or not. Using this column it is easy to filter out the strings already translated.

The popup edit window for the translation has a checkbox, added in APEX 18, that allows you to update all existing occurrences of the source string with a new translation. This is useful if you have, for example, 100 buttons with the label "Save Changes" because you only need to do the translation once.

Also in APEX 18, a "Grid Edit" page was added so you could edit the translations using a tabular form. In APEX 19, this tabular form was replaced with an interactive grid.

This interactive grid also includes the "Translated" column that can be used to filter out the translations which are already done.

Note that sorting by the "Translate From" or "Translate To" columns in the interactive grid is not possible (if you try you'll get an "ORA-00932: inconsistent datatypes: expected - got NCLOB" error). But the list of available columns include "Translate From (Partial)" and "Translate To (Partial)" which extracts the first part of the string as a regular varchar2 (usually the strings to translate are not that long so you'll see the full string in the "Partial" column). If you need to sort the strings (I find it useful to sort alphabetically by the source string in order to find identical strings and use copy/paste to update the translation), use these "Partial" columns to set up the sorting.


Thanks to Joel Kallmann for taking the time to add these small but very useful enhancements into APEX based on my feedback.

APEX custom Theme Style performance

When you create an application in Oracle Application Express (APEX) using the Universal Theme, the application comes with a few default "Theme Styles" which are essentially various stylesheets that you can switch between to go from the default blue (called "Vita") to, for example, the dark grey style (called "Vita - Slate").

You can use the Theme Roller in Oracle Application Express (APEX) to customize the colors and other settings, and by saving these you create your own Theme Styles. In this video, Shakeeb from the Oracle APEX team demonstrates how to use the Theme Roller, and he also briefly mentions that the generated stylesheet for custom theme styles can be placed into the filesystem for better performance.

I recorded a video myself to discuss the details of how custom Theme Styles affect the performance of your APEX application, and how you can move the Theme Style generated stylesheets to a web server to maximize performance and minimize bandwidth consumption:

Another issue that I did not mention in the video is that when you pick an icon for your application, APEX creates an app-icon.svg file (for the logo itself) and app-icon.css (that references the svg file), and places both those files in your Static Application Files.

Now since these files (and all other Static Application Files) are stored in the database, they require a database hit to retrieve, instead of fetching them from (and caching them on) the web server filesystem.

So if you want to maximize performance, I suggest that you remove the reference to the logo CSS file from your application (and delete the files from the Static Application Files).

If you really want that logo icon, you could of course place the .svg and .css files on the web server and reference them from there instead.

Thoth Gateway version 1.4.3 now available

I've updated the Thoth Gateway (a PL/SQL web gateway similar to mod_plsql and ORDS, but written in .NET that allows you to run APEX and PL/SQL Web Toolkit applications using Microsoft IIS web server).

The latest release is version 1.4.3. It fixes a few minor issues, but more importantly it is compiled against the latest ODP.NET Managed Driver.

Among other things, this version of the Managed Driver supports Oracle Advanced Security Option (ASO) encryption; without this certain operations such as APEX file uploads would cause "OracleInternal.Network.NetworkException: ORA-12537: Network Session: End of file" errors against an Oracle 18c database.

When upgrading to Thoth Gateway v1.4.3 or later, please make sure you also copy the Oracle.ManagedDataAccess.dll file in addition to the PLSQLGatewayModule.dll file to make sure you have the correct library.

Enjoy!

APEX Plugin: Execute PL/SQL code and return content to page (updated)

Oracle APEX has a built-in Dynamic Action called "Execute PL/SQL Code" that executes a block of PL/SQL code on the server via an Ajax call (ie does not do a regular submit and reload of the whole page).

But what if you want to do something on the server AND also return some content back to the client? Back in 2012 I released an APEX Dynamic Action plugin called "Execute PL/SQL Code and Return Content" that allows you to do just that. Read the original blog post for more information.

Since then, the APEX framework has evolved and the old Ajax workhorse function called "htmldb_Get" has been deprecated and replaced with functions in the "apex.server" namespace. Hence I have updated my plugin to use the modern API.

You can find the updated version (1.1) of the plugin on my GitHub page for APEX plugins. Note that the new plugin has been exported from APEX 18.1 and therefore requires at least that version to import and use.

Enjoy! :-)