Can you believe that we’ve passed the half way point of the year already? Time is flying but the good news is that we managed to find some time to include 5 new plug-ins in our FREE open source suite of plug-ins, whilst providing APEX 21.1 compatibility and fine tuning and fixing a few things. Now if you’re too eager to continue reading about them then just head over to fos.world to download and install them, otherwise please keep reading:

New Plug-ins

Lets have a look at each of them in a little more detail:

1. Advanced Password

This new item plug-in offers a visual, highly customizable alternative to the regular password input item. This plug-in is the perfect solution to enforce your application’s own password requirements like length, case, character mix, special characters etc. it really shines for password confirmation in signup or password reset forms.

Visual features include:

• Optionally show the password rules with a visual indicator showing if/when rules have been met (or not)
• Optionally display an icon when the “Caps Lock” is active
• Optionally add a “Peek” button to reveal the typed in password (helps the user avoid typing mistakes)
• Optionally display a colored bar beneath the input field that checks the strength of the password as the user types
• Optionally disable other page items until all the rules are completed e.g. a confirmation password page item

Here’s an example of it in action:

2. Drag & Drop

This new dynamic action plug-in makes possible to drag & drop elements inside a region. This could be a cards region, a badge list or basically everything that has a group of elements.

Here’s an example of it in action:

3. Image Slider

This is a new region plug-in which displays a gallery of lazily loaded images. It is based on the modern Swiper slider (https://swiperjs.com/) which also supports mobile devices, accelerated transitions and native behavior.

This plug-in offers the most commonly-used features such as autoplaying, looping, thumbnails gallery, different display modes/size for the images and so on. It offers various slide-transition options and a built-in description box which can be easily customized using CSS if necessary.

Here’s an example of it in action:

4. Popup LOV Actions

This new dynamic action plug-in adds the ability to dynamically set the value of a native Popup LOV item(s), including the items listed in the “Additional Outputs” attribute. Additionally it can also provide a “Clear” button, so you’re able to clear/reset the Popup LOV value (and all the associated items) with just one click.

Here’s an example of it in action:

5. Range Slider

This new page item plug-in integrates the noUISlider JavaScript Range Slider (https://refreshless.com/nouislider/). It is a lightweight range slider with multi-touch support and is packed with features. It supports numeric and date ranges, non-linear ranges, has keyboard support, and it works great in responsive designs. You can:

• Use it vertically or horizontally
• Use either a single or multiple value range
• Restrict the minimum/maximum range values
• Set page items with the range values
• Control the range color
• Control the step size

It’s the perfect page item filter for your reports and charts. Here’s an example of it in action:

Enhancements to Existing Plug-ins

In addition to new plug-ins we have also made the following enhancements to existing plug-ins based on user feedback.

FOS – Execute PLSQL Code

You can now get and return a JSON object directly into a Javascript function. This can make it more seamless and reduces the steps required to run some client side Javascript code using the JSON result from your PLSQL.

FOS – Interactive Grid – Add Button

We now use the “Custom Prefix Class” for font icons if one is specified in the theme definition. Thanks Martin Giffy D’Souza for the suggestion.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed: FOS – Interactive Grid Process Rows: processing selected rows is now working as expected in APEX 21.1 due to a change in APEX_QUERY_CONTEXT now running in an autonomous transaction. A commit has been added to allow collection data (i.e. selected row primary keys) to be available in APEX_QUERY_CONTEXT.
• Fixed: FOS – Redirect URL: when redirecting to a modal dialog page the dialog closed event will now fire correctly. We would like to thank Scott Wesley and Alan Arentsen for this fix!
• Fixed: FOS – Splitter: when resizing the splitter and there is a child iframe in the region being resized smaller, the iframe will no longer grab focus when you resize quickly. We would like to thank Roel Hartman for this fix!

Known Issues

• It is not possible to modify the FOS Theme Style – this is an APEX 21.1 issue which doesn’t correctly replace UTR’s substitution strings and breaks the LESS compiler. It’s been reported and should be fixed in one of the future APEX releases.
• FOS – Splitter – due to a page template behavior change i.e. “Always Render Layout” is now set to “Off” the splitter plug-in breaks. The fix is to set this back to “On” or alternatively you can fix it by adding a dummy class to the “Column CSS Classes” on one direct child sub-regions of the splitter region. See the splitter plug-in demo for further details.

In Summary

There’s now 21 plug-ins in the FOS suite, which is quite fitting for the 21.1 release and funnily enough purely co-incidental. We’re pretty confident there should be a use case for one of them at least in every app you build so head over to fos.world to download and install them.