Oracle APEX – The Standard Component Attributes Anatomy Series: Comments

Comments

The Comment attribute might be one of the most universally available fields in Oracle APEX. It allows developers to quickly leave notes or remarks—for themselves or for teammates—that are never shown to end users during runtime.

You'll find the Comment field at nearly every level of the application: pages, regions, items, reports, shared components, and more.

Unfortunately, in practice, this attribute is underused—just like code comments often are in traditional development. We've all heard the phrase “the code is the documentation”, but in the world of low-code, there's often not much code to speak of! 😄

So, the Comment attribute becomes a valuable space to capture important context, design decisions, or reminders directly where they matter most—inside the metadata.

Make it a habit: your future self (or teammate) will thank you.

Again, since these comments are stored as metadata in the APEX dictionary, you can easily access them using SQL queries. For example, if your team has a convention to mark ToDo tasks within comments, you can quickly generate a report of all outstanding action items like this:

SELECT
    application_id,
    page_id,
    item_name,
    component_comment
FROM
    apex_application_page_items
WHERE
    application_id = :app_id
and lower(component_comment) like '%todo%';

Last but not least, when exporting your application, you have the option to include or exclude developer comments right from the Page Designer export settings.

In the export options, you’ll find “Include Developer Comments” with two choices:

• On: Developer Comments are included in the application export.

• Off: Developer Comments are excluded from the export.

This gives you control over whether your internal notes travel with your application files—helpful when sharing with others or managing version control.

Enjoy life!