On Controlling Use of Minified Code in APEX

Today I encounted an issue during regression testing for 5.1. An older application that doesn't use the Universal Theme, and hasn't really been touched since 4.x, complained about the SkillBuilders modal page plugin.

The solution seemed pretty clear upon reading through this forum post - just update the relevant jquery.colorbox.js file to the latest version, no problem.

I just updated the minified version on my dev instance, jquery.colorbox-min.js, but saw no effect. After checking the code in my relevant plugin package (since all our plugin PL/SQL goes into packages), I saw it wasn't actually using the minified version, and it got me thinking.

apex_javascript.add_library(
      -- p_name      => 'jquery.colorbox-min',
      p_name      => 'jquery.colorbox',
      p_directory => p_plugin.file_prefix,
      p_version   => NULL
   );

Quite some time ago I remember learning about the #MIN# substitution string. The idea is you include files using my.file#MIN#.js, and it only used the minified code when you weren't in debug mode. (That double negative is just for Eddie.)

Item help when adding File URLs

My initial thought was to add it myself, based on the value of debug.

apex_javascript.add_library(
      p_name      => 'jquery.colorbox'||case when v('DEBUG') = 'NO' then '-min' end,      
      p_directory => p_plugin.file_prefix,
      p_version   => NULL
   );

Only to quickly realise the apex_javascript.add_library API has a dedicated parameter for such a task, though it expects dot notation in the filename, not a dash: my.file.min.js

apex_javascript.add_library(
      p_name      => 'jquery.colorbox',
      p_check_to_add_minified => true,
      p_directory => p_plugin.file_prefix,
      p_version   => NULL
   );

What surprised me though was looking through the other plugins. I couldn't find any in my current data source that used the p_check_to_add_minified parameter, they all just expected its use.

Do plugin developers not bother with p_check_to_add_minified?

Perhaps the newer plugins at apex.world use the parameter, if so I'll stand corrected.

Or perhaps there's little value for its use in our data driven pages, once the plugin is up and running. Any APEX plugin authors care to chime in?