Friday 22 December 2017

First impressions on mobile support in APEX 5.2EA

For APEX 5.2 the support of JQuery mobile to create mobile applications will be discontinued. The APEX development team have taken action to enable mobile development using the Universal Theme. In APEX 5.2EA you can already find the List View Region that will replace the equivalent component in JQuery Mobile.

The List View Region is defined with the same properties as in the Query Mobile version:




The region source contains a query and in the Attributes the role of the column is assigned.
After creating a page with a List View it looks like this.


So the data is present, but the formatting is not. So I read the release documentation again, found on the home page of APEX:


In the features document there is a paragraph about the List View Region.

Apparently we have to look into the Known issues. Here we find:


OK, that's easy. So the link is copied and pasted in the page's CSS file attribute. But alas, the file cannot be found :-(.
But it is visible that it is a JQuery mobile file. And of course that file can be found on the internet.
Indeed, a reference is found:

http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.4.5/jquery.mobile-1.4.5.css

Unfortunately this does not work, because Chrome does not accept mixed content ( mixed being both http and https). Luckily we get a warning in the Browser Inspector, and the https equivalent is available, so we use:

https://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.4.5/jquery.mobile-1.4.5.css

Now our page looks like this:

Much better, isn't it? It can still be improved though:
- there is a bit of wasted space to be recovered
- the search item can be styled
- the divider can use a bit more emphasis

So a bit of CSS is added:

/* remove wasted white space */
.t-Body-contentInner {
    padding: 0;
}
html .ui-filterable + .ui-listview, html .ui-filterable.ui-listview {
    margin-top: 0em;
}
.ui-filterable {
    padding: 4px 12px;
}

/* style search item */
.ui-filterable input {
    border: 1px solid lightgrey;
    width: 100%;
    padding: 0px 12px;
    border-radius: 4px;
}

/* give list divider background color */
.ui-listview > .ui-li-divider {
    background-color: lightgrey;
}

And now the page looks like this:


I could not resist also styling the counter as a badge ;-).

My conclusion is that the APEX development team are on the right track to replace the JQuery Mobile functionality.

Happy Apexing!