A couple of days ago the first Patchset for APEX 4.1 was released: APEX 4.1.1.

Read all about the Patchset, Download Options and more in the Blog Posts of Roel, Patrick, Mike, Dimitri and many others. Or simply go to APEX on OTN.

After i downloaded and installed (flawless, thanks for that guys and girls!) APEX 4.1.1 i compared it with APEX 4.1 to see what has changed (besides the obvious).

If you are new to APEX 4.1 please also consider reading my comparison of APEX 4.0 and 4.1.

Again i’m highlighting only a few changes i think might be important. If i talk about not documented Packages please just don’t use them if you aren’t 100% sure what they might break ;-)

Views:

• Views Security Checks (which data is the user allowed to see) have been improved, now using the new function wwv_flow_security.has_apex_administrator_role_yn -> that also removed the schema-check for the current APEX_0401xxx User, which might lead to less View changes in future versions
• APEX_WORKSPACE_FILES has description for more file-types
• APEX_APPLICATION_PAGES corrected evaluating the BROWSER_CACHE
• APEX_APPL_LOAD_TABLES changed the name of column TABLE_ID to LOAD_TABLE_ID (because the underlying Table Column has been renamed)
• and we got some new Views:
  • APEX_REST_RESOURCE_HANDLERS
  • APEX_REST_RESOURCE_MODULES
  • APEX_REST_RESOURCE_PARAMETERS
  • APEX_REST_RESOURCE_TEMPLATES

Packages:

• WWV_FLOW_API adds a function to change the Build-Options of an Application and a couple functions to handle REST Resources
• APEX_APPLICATION is enhanced by function trim_nl_sp_tab which trims New-Line, Spaces and Tabs from start and end of the input string
• WWV_FLOW_GLOBAL has a new switch “g_cloud”. Whatever that is used for :-)
• APEX_LANG lets you now overrule the application-id used in function MESSAGE
• APEX_UTIL can now check for “Must not be public User” in PUBLIC_CHECK_AUTHORIZATION and also got some new (non-public) functions: HAS_RESTRICTED_CHARS, SET_BUILD_OPTION_STATUS and CLOSE_OPEN_DB_LINKS
• APEX_ERROR gets new parameters to overrule the page-item or row-number and to ignore ORA-Errors. New function GET_ARIA_ERROR_ATTRIBUTES returns ARIA attributes for errornous items when running in screen-reader-mode
• APEX_JAVASCRIPT can now use minified js-files for runtime and uncompressed-js-files for debug-mode
• APEX_PLUGIN_UTIL has 2 new functions: PRINT_HIDDEN (adds a hidden input item) and PRINT_PROTECTED

General:

• APEX Items got a new attribute “Restricted Characters”, but I haven’t seen where it is used (yet)