Forms and Reports—The Basics - Beginning Oracle Application Express 4.2 - page 175

When creating forms, the APEX wizards do about 80% of what you want them to do.
The last 20% of fine-tuning is up to you, the developer. In this section you make a
number of small changes to the Manage Tickets and Ticket Details forms, with the
overall goal of increasing usability.
Item Layout
APEX 4.2 provides two ways to adjust item layout: adjusting certain item attribute set-
tings, and dragging items in the tree view. You'll use both of these methods to adjust
the Manage Tickets and Ticket Details forms.
Note The Drag & Drop Layout tool that has been present in previous versions of
APEX has been removed from APEX 4.2 due to the new Grid Layout method. A new
Drag & Drop Layout tool that conforms to the Grid Layout is expected to be released
with a future version of APEX.
APEX lays out Form items using standard HTML tables and refers to them as grids .
Think of a grid as a coordinate system where items are placed either next to one anoth-
er or above one another. This grid layout may seem limiting, but you can rearrange
items using the grid attributes of items. In this section you use the grid attributes of the
items on your page to move the Assigned To, Created On, and Created By items to a
single row.
You begin by adjusting the Manage Tickets form layout by altering the item
P210_CREATED_ON so it's automatically populated with today's date. Then you set it
so it always displays in read-only mode, preventing users from making any changes:
1. Edit Page 210 of the application.
2. Edit the item P210_CREATED_ON by double-clicking its name.
3. In the Default Value section in Figure 6-55 , enter SYSDATE as the
Default Value and set Default Value Type to PL/SQL Expression .