Customising APEX built-in validation messages

I was working on an application and when trying to save some data, I was getting these error messages despite the fact I had no validations on my page. And what I wanted to know, how do I change these message contents?

APEX does some default checking based on entered data. A prime example of this is a date field. On a brand new application, I created a region and added a page item with the type as "Date Picker". If I enter text into the date input field that is not a date conforming to the date format, I will get the following error:

"Date Field does not match format DS."

 


First of all, DS? What is that? This particular application was created by uploading a spreadsheet, and I did not set that. In fact, my spreadsheet had no date data to begin with.

In saying that, a quick search in the globalization attributes, and somehow this application has the date format set to "DS". So first, let us change that - I like to use DD-MON-YYYY.

So that fixes the error message from the aspect of printing out the format mask I want to see. Now it reads as:

"Date Field does not match format DD-MON-YYYY."

But what if I want to change this message entirely? I can tell this error message is referencing 2 parameters:

  1. Label - Date Field
  2. Format Mask - DD-MON-YYYY

But I may want to show an entirely different message when the user enters bad data - what can I do?

I don't come from a background of working with translated applications, but I was pretty sure this built-in was something to do with "Text Messages" that you find in Shared Components. Problem is, when I go to "Text Messages" there is not one predefined message. Can I still customise the message?

Short answer - Yes.

There is a website available where you can review built-in text messages, as well as install other languages into your application. So, what we want to do is search for our message on this website. So first step, go to the website and navigate just to the original English translation.

http://translate-apex.com/apex/f?p=800:11:::::P11_PACKAGE_ID:1

Once here, we can search our message. We want to exclude the parameters from the error message in our search. Therefore, I ended up just searching for the text: "does not match format". Here we will find the message:

Message Code: APEX.DATEPICKER_VALUE_INVALID
Message: #LABEL# does not match format %0.

The message code is the key bit of information. 

Back over to our APEX application now, if we navigate to Shared Components, Text Messages. Let's create a new message - we specify the name as the message code that we determined in the previous step. Of course in the message, we set it to the new validation we want to show when the built-in validation fails. 

For the example in this article, let's enhance the message to include a sample input - #LABEL# does not match format %0. e.g. 01-JAN-2020.

 

With that set, our validation message now shows like so:

Thanks to Martin D'Souza for pointing me in the right direction on this.

Popular posts from this blog

Report row buttons firing a dynamic action

Image
A lot of the time on reports of data, we'll define a link column, and specify an image which is the beloved pencil icon. Which is good and all, but looking in the Sample Database Application (packaged application), they have taken a different approach to style links - a button that stretches the width of it's containing cell. So, the UI ends up looking like so: So, is this done? Well first, you define a new column for the placeholder. Suppose I want my link column to be Report, I define an extra column in my query: , 'Report' report_link Then I need to go to my new column's attributes, and change the column type to a link. And, in the link attributes, set the text to what you want displayed. Here, I'm just going to display the value of the new column and point to my desired page. So I set the target page, then also the Link text as #REPORT_LINK#. At this point the report will just show link text, as we expect. So, then to replicate t
Read more

Accessing the last request value from a page submission

Image
When you submit the page, you will typically have page processes that run. For me, I use these request values to determine which processes are run. This is rather straight forward for on submit processes as you can just specify the condition request = Expression 1 Or, if you have multiple requests that link to this process, Request is Contained within Expression 1, and Expression 1 would be a comma delimited set of values. Request simply refers to the bind variable :REQUEST (or apex_application.g_request). If we try and do the same on a page rendering process, we no longer have access to this value - which makes sense. If you update the branch, to set the request portion of the URL, we will then be able to access the bind variable :REQUEST in all page rendering processing points. This has the obvious downside that if the user wants to reload the page,  clicks in the address bar and hits enter (or clicks refresh), the processes on that condition
Read more

Installing Oracle Instant Client on Ubuntu

Now that Oracle has enabled us to download instant client without any click through for accepting the license , I wanted to revisit a seamless install of the instant client on a new set up. Ubuntu has the documentation about installing the instant client here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Oracle%20Instant%20Client. First - because Oracle provides their releases in RPM archive format (or a tarball), in order to have an installer you need to create a DEB archive. There is a package in the archives, alien, which aids this process. This gives the start of the script: #!/bin/bash # Install dependencies sudo apt install alien The 3 packages the Ubuntu documentation tells us to retrieve are: - devel - basic (I opt for basiclite instead) - sqlplus So, over at the downloads page: https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/instant-client/linux-x86-64-downloads.html we can grab the link. # Download files. Example specific to 19.3 # Some links were not correct on the do
Read more