How to get a list of all page-level APEX_ITEMS in the current page? - oracle-apex

Question

I have an Apex application that is quite large. The need has come up to store detailed usage logs of this application. The information on APEX_WORKSPACE_ACTIVITY_LOG is not enough, because I need to know what queries each user runs on each page.
My first thought was to get the actual Oracle query logs (V$SQL and such), but they provide no information on the user (as far as the database is concerned, all queries are made by APEX_PUBLIC_USER). I have some information about the user on V$ACTIVE_SESSION_HISTORY, but that's incomplete because it stores samples of active sessions and their SQL queries at 1-second intervals, so I miss too many queries.
So now I'm off to implementing application level logging. The "right" way to fo this would be to go through all the pages in my application and create a logging process to store the relevant information for each one (username and some page items). But I wonder if there might be something simpler that does the trick.
If I understand correcly, "application processes" are run by every page in the application. So if I can get an application process to iterate over the list of page items, I can store them all in the database and be done with it. Something like
for item in page_items {
log(username, item_name, item, date)
}
Can this be done? Or maybe the information I need is on the database already and I don't see it?

Answer 1

You can query the metadata tables to get all items for a specific page and then use that to get their value.
select item_name, v(item_name) item_value
from apex_application_page_items
where application_id = :APP_ID
and page_id = :APP_PAGE_ID;
That will capture all items on the page. Don't forget that if you use items on Page 0 (Global Page) you may want to query that page too.
Additionally, you may want to capture application level items too.
select item_name, v(item_name) item_value
from apex_application_items
where application_id = :APP_ID;