Oracle APEX Tutorial: How to Trigger On-Demand Processes from Oracle APEX Menu Popup Lists

i don't like the ‘quick, look busy’ pages where there are 20 buttons on the screen and the users feels like they’re operating one of NASA’s 1969 rocket launching control panels.

I tend to create menu popup lists and i usually have a target page for the user to go to, so i never had a problem, but i had this case where i didn't need a target page - all i wanted was a button to invoke a page process inside the menu. Since list items normally expect to navigate somewhere, i first tried to make the entry target take me to a “void” target and then use a Dynamic Action on click. That failed silently, because the popup menu intercepts and consumes the click event before my Dynamic Action can see it.

butttt…to get it to work there is another way, use custom event instead of relying on the click

1. we create a dynamic list, for item target column we set it to javascript:apex.event.trigger(document,'postAccruals',{});

   

   to know more about APEX dynamic lists take a look at the documentation 16.8.3 Creating Dynamic Lists

2. Create a Dynamic Action with:
   Event = Custom

   Custom Event = postAccruals
   (Scope = document/page, depending on how you configure it. for me i prefer document as it triggers the event on at the page level, not at a specific element.)

   

   that’s,it this we tell APEX: when someone clicks this menu item, fire a custom event postAccruals (step 1),
   and The dynamic action listen to a custom event postAccruals, so clicking the menu item will trigger it and it will run the DA actions. (step 2)

3. now for the main event, what we wanted to do… running the process:
   lets add a
   1. confirmation true action (to give the user a chance to think about it)
   2. execute JavaScript code true action (to execute our page process)

   assuming you already have the on-demand process you will want to call it inside the JavaScript using apex.server.process() documentation 37.11 apex.server namespace

and that’s it…happy codding