Introduction

In Oracle OpenWorld 2019 (OOW) conference, developers of Oracle Application Express (APEX) gave some insights about the upcoming features in version 19.2.

As of writing this Blog APEX 19.2 hasn’t been released these features can be only be tried at https://www.tryapexnow.com/ or https://apex.oracle.com

You might be a bit excited, so let me introduce you to a remarkable feature “Faceted Search”. This is one of the most prominent functionality you will see in the new release.

What is Faceted Search?

In simple words, Faceted Search is a collection of predefined filters that can be applied on a dataset in order to narrow down the required results.

It is quite different from regular search functionality that mostly works based on keywords. But there are a lot of use cases where faceted search perform better, such as filtering products in an ecommerce store.

Faceted Search in Oracle APEX 19.2

Oracle APEX is smart enough to understand your data and create useful Faceted Search filters automatically for your application. These filters are also known as “Facets” and each facet represents a column of database table.

You can create different types of facets according to your needs. Most commonly used facets are range selector, radio button, checkbox, dropdown list and a normal search input field.

I’ve noticed that in a lot of cases automatically generated filters doesn’t fulfill our requirements. But you don’t have to worry because Oracle APEX provides you with the ability to completely customize these filters however you like.

A Simple Demonstration

In this section, I’ll setup a new APEX application for displaying a Faceted Search region.

In your workspace, go to “App Builder” > “Create a New App” > “From a File”.

Get Started Now

Create an Application

At this point you need to upload your data file. For the purpose of this example I’ll use a publicly available sample data of Airbnb in CSV format. You can get the CSV file from here.

Provide “Table Name” and press “Load Data”.

Load Data

It will take some time to upload the file. Click on the “Create Application” button when your file is uploaded successfully.

Oracle APEX will automatically generate few pages according to our data. Here you can also select additional features or change some settings. If everything looks fine then press the “Create Application” button from the bottom of this page.

To view your recently created app simply click the “Run Application” button and enter your login credentials.

You will be presented with a nice admin panel.

Now to see the Faceted Search feature in action go to “Airbnb Listings Seach” menu.

Try different filters and watch how the result set changes accordingly.

If you want to customize anything on this page then press “Edit Page”. Here you will see self-explanatory interface about every single component of page which you can modify as required.

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