Oracle APEX - open a Page in another Application from navigation Menu

Today I developed an application in Oracle APEX for our customer and bumped into an interesting issue.

I wanted to create a navigation menu item to open a page from another application. But it seems that it was not supported out-of-the-box!

APEX provided me with only 2 options to chose - either a page from the current application or a custom URL. There was no option to open a page from another application, which is an ordinary functionality in other parts of an APEX (button, link column in IR...).

So, I needed to make an override of this limitation.

The approach was pretty simple but effective:

• First I created an application item to store an URL of a target page in another application
• Then I created an application computation to compute the URL using APEX_PAGE API
• Then I selected an URL as a target type 
• And finally I used a calculated application item's value in a form of substitute variable as a target URL value

An example.

Created an application item to store a target URL:

Created an application calculation to calculate an URL:

Set up a menu list entry attributes and use an application item's value as a substitute string:

And it works like a charm!