What's new in APEX 24.2: Select Many and Faceted Search Improvements

In Oracle APEX 24.2 you will find new components but also improvements to existing components. In this blog post, you will learn about the improvements made to Select Many Item and the Faceted Search Region.

Select Many Item

Select Many item was introduced in Oracle APEX 24.1. This item allows you to display a LOV-based item that shows suggestions that allow multi-values. When the end user clicks the field, a popup window appears with a list of suggested values. A Select Many item provides a more user-friendly select item compared to a Popup LOV and supports filtering, groups, and template directives.

In APEX 24.1, end users were able to search across multiple columns and select multiple options, all while keeping the select dropdown open. Also, developers can style search results using custom HTML with Template Directives, and optionally include icons and groups. Selected options appear as chips while editing, or as a delimited list otherwise.

Watch the following video to see how this item works and notice how hard can be for an end user to know how many options or values were selected.

What's New in APEX 24.2 for Select Many Item?

When developers use the attribute Display Values as "Comma-separated List", the item will show a button counter. This counter button displays the current number of selected values. On runtime, when end users press the counter, it opens the dropdown, displaying only the selected values.

Faceted Search Improvements

• On the property editor, you will find two options to display the Faceted Search facets:
  • Inline: The regular attribute that displays the facet inline in the facet region.
  • Add Filter Dialog: This new attribute displays the facet in a filter dialog. It will help to have many facets easily available on the page.

• It's very common to add new columns to existing tables that might be used on a Faceted Search Region, and then you need to add these facets manually. However, as of APEX 24.2, you will find the Synchronize Facets Feature for both the Faceted Search Region and Smart Filters regions!
  This feature allows you to create new facets for existing regions quickly by right-clicking under Facets.

Watch these two enhancements in Faceted Search Region in the following video:

Try these features and other new features in APEX 24.2 on Oracle Cloud, apex.oracle.com or download this release from apex.oracle.com/download.