This recipe describes the tasks needed to create an APEX 4.0 application. You should have APEX 4.0 installed or have an account on Oracle's online APEX environment at http://apex.oracle.com and your web browser should be a modern browser like Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 or higher or Mozilla Firefox 1.0 or later. The starting point is the Oracle Application Express home page:
You will see a page where you can choose between database applications or websheet applications. Furthermore, you see already created applications.
In APEX you have two ways of selecting and proceeding to the next step most of the time. Usually, there is an icon accompanied by a radio button. When you check the radio button, you must click the Next button after that to proceed. When you click the icon, you automatically go to the next step. In this book, when there is the situation that you have to select one of the shown options, we will only tell which one of the options you should select. You can decide yourself which way to select and proceed.
The next step in the wizard is the pages. You can start with a blank page and, from that starting point, extend your APEX application. You can also choose to add reports and forms beforehand. At this point you don't actually define the contents of the pages, you just create the 'skeleton' of them.
The next step is the option to copy shared components from another application. Shared components are objects that can be used throughout the application, for example a list of values or images. Since we create a simple application from scratch, we don't want to copy shared components from another application. Select No.
An authentication scheme is a means of allowing users access to our application. APEX offers different methods for this. More will be explained in another recipe. The scheme for this application will be selected in the next step.
Now that we have completed the wizard, we can click on the create button to confirm. The application will be created and we will see a number of pages, depending on how many pages we already created in step 6.
Depending on the type of authentication, we will also see page 101—Login. This is the default page APEX navigates to when you run an application using authentication. It is generated automatically with all functionality to allow users to log in to our application.
Click the large Run Application button to go to the login page.
We can log in on this page with the same credentials we use to gain access to the APEX development environment. So enter this username and password and click the Login button.
Well, that's it! We've created and run our first Oracle APEX 4.0 application. We can now click on the pages to define them, or we can add new pages to extend our application. We can also click the run application icon to see what has actually been created. Since we only included an empty page, we will see something like this—an empty application except for a single, also empty page:
18.119.103.204