Chapter 7. Dynamic Actions

Dynamic Actions are a new feature of APEX 4.0 that allows you to implement Ajax functionality with minimal coding. To understand why Dynamic Actions are important, a little history of Ajax is in order. The name Ajax is an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It is more of a programming methodology than a new programming language. Prior to 1999 when Microsoft created the XMLHTTP ActiveX object, refreshing any content on a web page required a refresh of the entire page. The problem with full page refreshes was that if the user entered data before the refresh, the developer was often responsible for saving that data so that it reappeared after the new page was displayed. The drawback was that the developer needed to know something about all of the following technologies:

• XHTML

• The Document Object Model (DOM)

• CSS

• Use of the XMLHttpRequest object

• JavaScript