Oracle APEX – The Standard Component Attributes Anatomy Series: Help

In this fourth post of The Standard Component Attributes Anatomy Series, we’re diving deep into the Help standard attribute.

Although often overlooked, the Help attribute plays an important role in improving the user experience by providing clear, contextual guidance right where it’s needed.

Whether you're building internal tools or public-facing applications, leveraging this feature effectively can reduce user confusion and support requests.

Help

As the name suggests, the Help sections in Oracle APEX provide a built-in mechanism for developers to define help text for various components. This information is processed and made available to end users in different ways, depending on the type of component.

Once again, the entered information is stored in the APEX metadata schema, which means that any changes to the help text will require a redeployment to propagate those changes to other environments.

For small applications, this feature is very convenient—it simplifies your life by keeping everything within the APEX builder. Help texts are automatically exported and included in your application deployment, so there's nothing extra to manage.

These help text strings are also available for translation in multi-language applications, making it easy to provide localized guidance for users in different regions.

However, in more complex or enterprise-level solutions, you might prefer to implement a custom help system—for example, storing help content in database tables—so that updates can be made dynamically without requiring a full redeployment.

Page-Level Help

For page-level help, the content entered by the developer can be retrieved at runtime using the HELP procedure in the APEX_APPLICATION package. This gives you control over how and when to display help content to users.

For example, a modal dialog page—accessed via a button in the navigation bar—could include a Dynamic PL/SQL Region that displays the help text defined by the developer for the current page. This can be done using a call like the following:

APEX_APPLICATION.HELP(p_flow_id => :APP_ID);

More details can be found in the APEX API documentation.

Setting Page Help

Unfortunately, there is no official setter procedure exposed in the public APEX API to update page help text programmatically.

If you want to enable power users to edit page help dynamically, you may need to rely on undocumented procedures.

Item-Level Help

For items, APEX provides two distinct attributes:

• Inline Help Text

• Help Text

As the attribute descriptions suggest:

• Inline Help Text is displayed directly next to or below the item. It provides immediate, field-level guidance, which is particularly useful for improving accessibility or offering quick hints.

• Help Text (the "old" style) is shown on demand—typically when the user clicks the help icon next to the item. This is ideal for more detailed or contextual explanations that don't need to be always visible.

Because of this visual distinction, developers often use a short, concise message for inline help and reserve longer, richer content (potentially including HTML formatting and substitutions) for the help dialog.

Note: Help text fields support HTML and dynamic substitutions, including application, page items, and system variables.

Retrieving Help Text from the Data Dictionary

Like most metadata in APEX, help content is stored in the APEX dictionary views and can be queried. For example, to retrieve item-level help information, you can run:

SELECT application_id,
       page_id,
       item_name,
       display_as,
       item_help_text,
       inline_help_text
FROM apex_application_page_items
WHERE application_id = :APP_ID;

The same applies to page-level help texts:

SELECT application_id,
       page_id,
       help_text
FROM apex_application_pages
WHERE application_id = :APP_ID;

Enjoy life!