Oracle Forms New Feature Ideas

Michael Ferrante-Oracle

There has been lots of discussion around what features "might" find their way into the next Forms release.  Wouldn't it be cool if one of your suggestions became one of those "new" features?  Well, it's time to be heard.  We posted threads like this several times during other release cycles and have found them to be very helpful.  As a result I will continue to start threads like this from time to time.

Although many other improvements are planned for the coming release, UI will be a main focus.  So what ideas do you have?  Here is a template you can use to share your idea.  Feel free to copy it.

SUGGESTION DETAILS

WHAT VALUE WOULD THIS ADD TO APPLICATIONS OR THE PRODUCT

EXAMPLE MOCKUP (IF POSSIBLE)

Here is an example of what you might share:

SUGGESTION DETAILS

Provide a way to hide selected sides of the border of text fields.  Currently a text field is shown with a border around all four sides of the rectangle or completely hidden (no sides shown).

WHAT VALUE WOULD THIS ADD TO APPLICATIONS OR THE PRODUCT

By providing selectable border sides, applications could be designed to more easily resemble their HTML counterparts. This would be one step more toward helping to modernize the Forms runtime UI.

EXAMPLE MOCKUP (IF POSSIBLE)

ben_g

Hi Michael

Thank you, I'll think of some suggestions to post here.

Would you like to receive suggestions relating to Form Builder here or in a separate thread? I bounce really hard off it every time I switch back from Visual Studio or NetBeans. Of course that's assuming you have resources to improve the IDE

Regards

Ben

Holger.Lehmann

Ok, I'm telling some thoughts:

• better support of calling and consuming webservices for feature enhancements
• a public betatest for the next release (ok, no new feature, just a personal wish)
• ability to store more information from formweb.cfg in the repository
• and I don't renew the things about Flexible UI, Repsponsive Design and so on, that's not Forms business

Michael Ferrante-Oracle

Feel free to add any Forms specific suggestions in this thread.  Regarding the Builder, although we are currently not planning any big changes for it, we are planning to make a variety of improvements.  One thing not on the roadmap at this time would be to do extensive redesigned.  For Builder, we are looking at cleanup and minor updates to help improve working efficiently.  For example, possibly adding wheel mouse support in places where it is currently not available, adding right-mouse click editing features (cut/copy/paste), etc.  Although unclear if anyone uses it, we plan to make a minor improvement to the Object List Report.  And numerous others like that... There are a few larger scale changes being discussed for Builder, but we are not prepared to share those details at this time.

Regardless of what your idea is, share it anyway.  All suggestions will be considered.  However, if you want your idea to have the highest chances of inclusion, be reasonable.  As mentioned, extensive redesigns the Builder is not planned. Again, the target areas include, but are not limited to:  runtime UI, FSAL, admin tooling (e.g. FMC/EM, FADS), performance, security, and other areas that I'm not at liberty to discuss

Whatever ideas you have, please share them.  Be sure to provide as much detail as possible.

SFrix

Hi, Thanks Michael to let us make our wish list here.

I have two requests regarding the builder.

It could be super cool to have a feature allowing to make a diff between two modules and allowing to merged changes. Today we have to use an external tool to do that. To be able to call by command this feature will be the cherry on the cake.

Auto-completion for the code is also a feature that could good to have (specially when you use get_*_property or set_*_property built-in but for all form built-in and pl/sql code).

Are they reasonable ? ;-)

Thanks

Michael Ferrante-Oracle

@Holger.Lehmann

What did you have in mind when you asked about storing "more" formsweb.cfg information in repository?  Today we do not store any information from our config files in repo.  Can you be specific?  What would you like stored in repo and why?

Michael Ferrante-Oracle

@SFrix

Auto-complete in the PLSQL editor is not likely something we can do for any near term release.

Regarding your idea for "diff", what exactly would you like to see?  Diff what?  We already give you the ability to diff properties.  Diff'g the code and identifying each difference would be extremely difficult without making significant changes.  However, it may be possible to expose something more like what we currently do for properties.  What if you selected two (or more) triggers and if they are not all exactly the same we show something like **** in the Property Palette or somewhere else?  Again, we already do this for Properties. I suspect we could do similar for triggers, PUs.  Doing this for pl/sql libraries may be difficult, but not impossible.

Holger.Lehmann

Hi Mike,

I thought of hiding the application user that runs a form if it is not user specific or every user does login with a specific userid.

Often there is a user/password with term userid= in formsweb.cfg that could be moved to the OPSS repository maybe,

Walid KHARRAT

Thanks for the initiative,

posibility to get "meta-data" from paramlist : get the list of parameters included in the paramlist and possibility to loop and  extract value of each parameter.

possibility to get list of forms opened. and the current active form from this list.

possibility to order the close of one forms from another

possibility to send custom event from one form to another.

i want the possibility to manage forms from background form(the main form) javascript event and pjc can be attached only in the main form and they have the ability to send events to another forms specially the active one.

Walid KHARRAT

have the integration with VCS tools (git, svn ...) this can be very helpful

Holger.Lehmann

Another topic for linux based systems:

there are many binary package as a prerequisite for an installation:

question? why can't these packages be automatically installed by the installer?

same for windows: the Visual C++ Files. they have to be manually installed at the moment ?