Saturday 1 August 2020

APEX 20.1 nugget: Mega menu's

A few days ago I downloaded and installed APEX 20.1. I was inspired by the presentations of Shakeeb Rahman and Patrick Wolf on ODTUG Learn from home. They talked about mega menu and user friendly URL's. And I thought, I want to have this too!

So I downloaded the installation package, studied the installation/upgrade manual carefully, and followed the instructions as well as possible. In the past I have had troubles with ords and static files support after upgrading, costing me hours to fix. This time everything went smoothly and after performing all the indicated steps I fired up my new APEX 20.1, and it worked :-).
I suppose it pays to RTFM.

Mega menu's

Mega menu's provide a large menu, where you have all the menu options available at once. 
In my APEX demo application the menu's have been a constant struggle for me. I wanted all the pages to be reachable from the menu directly, but this way the menu grew too long and the options disappeared below the bottom of the screen (even on my 27" iMac!). 
So mega menu's were very promising. And indeed they did fulfill my expectations.:




The nice thing is that Mega menu's work on the same data as the original APEX side menu. So initially you do not have to change anything to start using them. Just change some setting in the User Interface and you have your own Mega Menu:



You can visit my APEX demo application https://www.speech2form.com/ords/detora/r/opfg to see the Mega Menu in action. It took me about half an hour to reconstruct the menu. Btw, do you notice the user friendly URL? 

Of course once you have got your menu, you can tweak the content to your liking. Watch this video by Shakeeb Rahman on Mega Menu's. Unfortunately I was not able to find a recording of the webinar from ODTUG Learn from Home Series in which Shakeeb demonstrates what you can do with Mega Menu's in great detail. 

Happy APEXing

No comments: