APEX 5 first peek - File Management

A number of changes have been made to dust off the file management facilities, some of which won't be immediately apparent until we get the chance to spread our wings in our own environments.

File Location

A Static File Prefix has been introduced and appears to use repository files when not specified, and virtual path for your webserver if specified.
It could be similar to the way you might parameterise your file locations with an application item like &F_FILE_LOCATION.

New User Interface property

Plug-ins will support the same behaviour.
I think this will probably make more sense to me when I can muck around in my own environment.

Shared Components

Thankfully the ambiguitity in shared components regarding static files has been removed.

Share Components

There is an Unzip File option, which I guess would make loading files in bulk really handy - but in the era of sprites you only need three files, right? CSS/JS & a massive image sprite ;-)

We also have the ability to define a directory for the static file location, which I didn't really understand at first...

Upload Static Files

... but it made more sense when I saw the file list, which has a very friendly Reference column showing how to identify the file.

Static file list

Perhaps you would synchronise with locations on your web server.

Templates

As I described in my themes & templates post, you can now associate supporting files with your template as you would currently for plug-in files.

Template definition

When referring to your files you can #MIN_DIRECTORY# to complement the #MIN# option - substituting /minified and .min respectively when not in debug mode.

These changes really seem to polish some of the slightly rough edges APEX has had in the past.