Naming conventions and rules

Every APEX item, on the application or page level, must have a unique name within the APEX developed application. Some of the naming convention rules that we'll review in this chapter, such as using prefixes that include the application ID or the page ID, help us to achieve this uniqueness. We also need to use meaningful names that will help us to locate and understand the origin and type of APEX items easily.

When dealing with the names of APEX items, we face some ambiguity regarding possible length and case sensitivity. The Application Builder allows item names to include up to 255 characters. However, this length doesn't adhere to the Oracle SQL and PL/SQL identifier's naming rules. This can create a problem if we want to use the APEX items in SQL or PL/SQL code, and for the most part we do. Hence, it's a good practice to use the Oracle identifiers rules when we name our APEX items.

Oracle Identifiers naming rules

The following are the relevant rules we should...