APEX 26.1 New Features: Sample data and Blank Page

A new Data Source was included in this release, you can see it when including a new component, it's called "Sample Data"

Some components like maps, charts and Calendar have this source type now, that is useful to get a visual idea of the final result on the page design even if there is no data available yet.

Whenever we're required to create a POC or demo APP, there is always a dashboard included, and if we don't have mucho time to work on it (as usual), sample data can be also extremely helpful.

In this example, I'm creating a new calendar page and selecting the Sample data source. When the page is created, in the regio properties we can see under "Source" the Location attribute was set as "Sample Data", and there is another attribute called "Sample data".

In that attribute we can pick from 4 different data sets. This is really convenient so demo data matches the application.

Let's see an example now using charts by creating a dashboard page, just selecting the page type and including a page name.

The page is generated and the 3 charts contain sample data by default.

We can see the properties of the series where columns form the data source are mapped. From here, even if your not familiar with APEX charts it's easy to have a good idea of how the region and the type of chart attributes work so you can include your own data source.

Finally, I wanted to check the Blank page template. This is literally a new template you can pick to have a clear page. No navigation, no header, no footer. Just removing everything but your regions.

Why? well, depend on the requirements could be useful. Showing a full page view of a dashboard could be one use case.