The Strategic Planner APEX Kanban Board Region

I was introduced to the Strategic Planner application by Simon Hunt QVRM, Head of Product Management, Oracle APEX at APEX World 2025 as part of his APEX Product Management Update talk. I was intrigued by how the Kanban Board has been developed - and decided to blog about it here.

The Strategic Planner application (or Our Strategic Planner - it goes by two names 😀) can be accessed under Gallery > Starter Apps is a Project management tool, apparently used within Oracle to plan various projects.

It’s provided to all APEX 24.2 users as a Starter Application.

After install, it starts like this…

To be honest, there’s a bug in the supporting object script, named seed first user which assumes my username is my email address (its not), so I had to delete it (❌) and add my username (✅) to Shared Components \> Application Access Control \> User Role Assignments - see picture below

After that, the app works fine.

Its also an interesting design approach to see that almost every page invoked by the Navigation Menu is a Faceted Search Page 🤔.

Then Click on Initiatives > Initiatives > Initiative 1 > Kebab Menu > Kanban and then you can see a Kanban Board. Don’t try this in Vita - Dark as the Kanban region CSS classes do not support the Colour Utility Classes.

Try dragging and dropping something

Quick Edit the Region and you’ll be astonished 😲 to find its a Classic Report. The fact that this is a Classic Report enables it to work beautifully with the Faceted Search controls.

However the magic is in Attributes > Appearance

A Template doing all the work? yes (really - no JS). In here it’s using some nifty templating to achieve the desired result (hey do you like Dracula Theme?)

As you can see, above, there are different templates for the first row, other rows and for each column. This layout assists the CSS in the rendering of the cards.

There are 247 lines of inline CSS though that turns what you see below into the actual real Kanban cards.

There is some JavaScript, however this is to do with dragging and dropping instead of the rendering of the Kanban Chart

There you go - a Kanban Board built through HTML and CSS, delivered through a Classic Report with Faceted Search features.

Bonus Feature: Go grab that amazing SP Theme style - it looks ace.

ENJOY

Whats the picture? it’s The Yorkshire. A four-star Hotel in the middle of Harrogate - visit Yorkshire.