When you are used to Designer 6.0 or up, you may be aware of shared or shareable components.  In ApEx Shared Components are available, too.

One specific object that is worthwhile sharing is the List of Values, LOV for short. The LOV has been known since the early Forms versions and these days it still exists. In ApEx 4.0 it is possible to create an LOV in one application and use it in others. Let’s suppose an application 100 and 200. 100 will serve as the central application that holds the core objects, LOVs in this case.

Define a number of LOVs, be it static or dynamic ones. Static LOVs contain fix predefined values, dynamic ones are basically fed by underlying tables, to be defined by the developer.  A classic example of where to store values for the LOVs is the (well-) known CG_REF_CODES table, though LOVs are not restricted to focus on this table.

Let’s assume that an LOV was defined in application 100, and we now want to use an LOV from application 100 in our other application 200. Within application 200 we have to move to the Shared Components environment.

  • Next, click on List of Values in the User Interface box.
  • Click on the yellow Create button, in the top right More >