Welcome to part one of a series in which I’ll share some of my best practices and tips for Oracle APEX development that I presented during a recent Lunch and Learn session. Through this series, I hope to help fellow developers improve coding standards, streamline development processes, and make the most of APEX's customization capabilities. Today, I’ll focus on an essential yet often overlooked aspect: Date and Number Formats.
Usually when developing an APEX application, many of us tend to rely on the Format Mask attribute, which is the fastest way to display data in a readable format. If you are a little bit more advanced in APEX, you might use the application date, date time, timestamp, and time zone format for the dates in Interactive grids, reports, or items. But what happens when you need different formats depending on the context or the information showing, or if it is a number or currency format?
Over the years, I've found that the best way to maintain consistency across an application is to centralize formats using application Substitutions. These can be used in most if not all, components and items and even inside PL/SQL code if needed.
By centralizing formats in one place, you make future changes quick and easy. If a format needs updating, you don’t have to hunt through every component or page in the app. Instead, a single change to the Substitution can update the format everywhere it's used. It’s a significant time-saver that reduces the risk of missing components that rely on a specific format.
Here's an example of how Substitutions can be applied both in components and PL/SQL:
Components:
PL/SQL:
This approach has saved me countless hours of refactoring, especially when a simple format change is needed across a large application. I hope it helps streamline your development too.
This is just the beginning! Stay tuned for Part II of this series, where I’ll dive into component customization and how you can make your APEX applications more dynamic and user-friendly. As always, feel free to reach out with any questions or insights you’d like to share.