How to renumber pages in an Oracle APEX application?

Question

Hey all,

I've just finished my first "real" APEX app but it's looking a bit messy. Is there any way I can renumber the pages so that they're back in order of the application flow?

Thanks in advance, Matt

Answer 1

Numbers are arbitrary. Don't go to the hassle of renumbering everything, as you'll need to test all the branches, tabs, breadcrumbs....

Answer 2

1. As Gary suggests, it's better to consider page numbers to be arbitrary.

2. You could export the application, edit the SQL script with the new page numbers (remembering to search for all locations where a page number is referenced), then re-import the application - and test it thoroughly :) - hopefully you don't have references to the pages in other applications though :)

3. In Apex 3.2 you can put your pages into Groups, which can be useful for sorting the pages out and make it easier to find the page you're interested in.

Answer 3

The following advice won't help you much with your current application, but I find it useful to plan out the general page numbering in advance.

I start by splitting my application into groups of pages, say, Accounting, Reports and Administration, and then assign 100 (or 1000) pages to each of those groups.

For example:

100 - Accounting (main page)
200 - Reports (main page)
300 - Administration (main page)

Then I assign sub-pages within each group, based on which pages my requirement analysis tells me I will likely need:

100 - Accounting (main page)
110 - List Invoices
120 - Edit Invoice
121 - Edit Invoice - Details Screen
130 - Add new invoice - step 1
131 - Add new invoice - step 2
132 - Add new invoice - step 3 
200 - Reports (main page)
300 - Administration (main page)

And so on, you get the idea. Leave some room between the numbers (110, 120, etc.) to be able to add a few pages later.

Of course, it's difficult to plan everything out in advance, so some out-of-place page numbers pages will have to be used after a while, but in my experience a bit of up-front planning makes it much more manageable (and easy to work with).