Grassroots Oracle: 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?

2 comments:

Erick Diaz20 December 2017 at 23:58:00 GMT+8
Hi Scott,

On my limited experience developing plug-ins I do tend to use the substitution string #min# for debugging purposes.

However, starting with APEX 5.0 there are few cases where you need to call the apex_javascript.add_library or apex_css.add_file procedures as it's possible to reference these files from the File URLs to Load section which Patrick Wolf mentions in this blog.

Additionally, the apex_css.add_file does not have a parameter to conditionally add the .min extension while the File URLs to Load section allows the use of #min# substitution string.

Thank you,

Erick
Scott Wesley21 December 2017 at 07:51:00 GMT+8
Thanks, Erick.

Upon review, it appears many of the plugins in use were written in a time before the plugin framework got more declarative.

Always interesting to watch APEX adapt over time.

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Wednesday, 20 December 2017

On Controlling Use of Minified Code in APEX

2 comments: