The Truth About False Actions

When Martin D'Souza was writing his chapter on Dynamic Actions for Expert Oracle Application Express, he sent me a bit of it for a technical review. I did the same with him for my chapter on Plug-ins. At the time, both of these topics were very new and I immediately learned something from a decision tree that he had created to show how Dynamic Actions work from a high level. The tree very clearly showed that false actions will only be executed if two things are true:

1. The Dynamic Action must have a condition
2. The condition must evaluate to false

It sounds simple enough but this important fact seems to loose itself on those that are new to Dynamic Actions. Even when this fact is understood, developers may still have trouble getting the false actions to fire because they can't think of a condition that will work for their situation. The key lies in understanding conditions and how flexible they can be.

Let's start by looking at a simple example. Let's say you want to hide/show a region based on the value of an item: 

The When portion of the Dynamic Action may look like:

Obviously the true action in this case is to show the region and the false action would be to hide the region. In this example we were able to make use of one of the declarative condition types: "equal to". Here are all of the options you have for the condition:

Most of the options are declarative, simply changing the way that the Value specified is evaluated. But there are two options which are a little different: "- No Condition -" and "JavaScript expression".

If you select "- No Condition -", guess what, NO FALSE ACTIONS! At that point only the event matters - in our current example that's the change event on the item P1_HIDE_SHOW. The Dynamic Action framework does a good job of making this point obvious by hiding the false actions when there is no condition but I wanted to make sure to remind readers of this fact here.

"JavaScript expression" is the powerhouse option. This is the option that you must learn to use! Like the declarative options, the JavaScript expression condition changes the way that Value is evaluated but it's much more flexible as you can enter any JavaScript expression you like. If you click on the label for the Value item you get the following popup:

Of the three bullets, the one you want to learn first is this.triggeringElement. Using the combination of the JavaScript expression condition type and this.triggeringElement, developers can create conditions that allow false actions to execute when they otherwise wouldn't.

Let's look at another example. Here the show/hide is based on two conditions rather than one:

At first glance it may seem impossible to do this with a Dynamic Action but with the JavaScript expression condition we can do it:

I could have simply hard coded the id for the first element but I wanted to show how one could use this.triggeringElement as it's more flexible - imagine using it in a tabular form where there are many checkboxes with "random" ids.

As you can see, Dynamic Actions are an incredible feature of APEX and with a little knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript they become even more powerful. Learn to use this feature sooner rather than later and look for the functionality and flexibility of the framework to increase with future releases of APEX. And if you remember nothing else from this post, remember that false actions only fire if there is a condition and it evaluates to false.