excel2collection functionality of ORDS will not work with APEX 5.1 or later

If you're using the functionality of Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) with Oracle Application Express to parse a Microsoft Excel file and store the parsed results in an APEX collection, I have good news and bad news.

Bad News:  This functionality will no longer work in Application Express 5.1 or later.  Due to architectural changes in the way that pages are submitted in APEX 5.1, this functionality was unfortunately (but necessarily) broken with no practical way to restore it.  And due to other necessary architectural changes, the bundled library which does the Excel parsing in ORDS is being removed in a future version of ORDS.

Good News:  Some customers have reported that they have successfully replaced this functionality using Anton Scheffer's EXCEL2COLLECTIONS plug-in.

We take very seriously our desire to always preserve existing functionality for customers, and to try to always avoid any change in user interface or functionality upon upgrade.  But in this case, it was simply not practical.

Thanks to Denes Kubicek for prominently raising this issue on the OTN discussion forum.