Oracle & APEX Geekery

  1 ½ years ago I went to Monterey to visit the ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2009 conference. I was very impressed with the presenters, content and great atmosphere of the event. After the conference, on my way home, I promised myself to come back to KScope, as a presenter, if possible. This year is the second time I submitted an abstract. And ... This week I received an email from the ODTUG confirming that my abstract has been accepted for presentation at ODTUG KScope11 , June 26-30, in Long Beach, CA. I feel very honored and happy to get this opportunity. Join the Cool Kids at Kscope11 Whether you’re interested in my presentation or not, if you are into Oracle Development, have some training time and budget left: Come to Long Beach next year and participate in this unique event. Kscope11 offers: More than 200 technical sessions on Application Express, BI and Oracle EPM, Database Development, Oracle Fusion Middleware, MySQL Five all day symposiums - No extra charge L...

    Language : English Paperback : 320 pages Release Date : March 2011 ISBN : 1849681066 ISBN 13 : 978-1-84968-106-3 Author : Mark Lancaster   March 2011 the book “ Oracle Application Express 4.0 with Ext JS ”, written by Mark Lancaster, is expected to be published by Packt Publishing, but it’s available NOW already as a RAW edition. RAW? What is a RAW edition? Well, basically, it’s a prerelease (Read As we Write). Some chapters are still missing and no guaranties, that anything you’re reading in this RAW edition will actually be in the final book release. So, this article will be a pre-review. Is it worth reading? I think it is. You will see: for this book, RAW means VERY WELL DONE already. Do be mislead by the title. This book is not solely about how to spice up your APEX GUI with ExtJS. This book discusses application GUI development with APEX in general and extending APEX functionality with ExtJS in particular. What will you learn fro...

Oracle just came with an update on its “ Statement of Direction ” for APEX. Once again Oracle confirms that APEX will continue its efforts to enhance this development platform, which should not be a surprise, but there were often doubts (especially from IT management) whether APEX will be a platform to base long term planning on, preferring ADF as the framework primarily promoted as the-way-to-go. Apex is mature, and will become more mature with the announced enhancements in this SOD.   Oracle continues to invest in the development and support of Oracle Application Express and new versions of Application Express will be released at least annually. So, version 4.1 should not be too far away from being released, as 4.0 is almost half a year “old” now (not taking into account the time the EA release was available). Oracle lists some features planed for the upcoming version, and I just would like to comment on some of them:   Development for Mobile Applications...

Sometimes you get information and you ask yourself: "Why didn't I know this? This would have made (certain) things so much easier!" or "I didn't know I could do this". Well, this just happened to me and after asking a few colleges, I found out: I’m not the only Oracle developer who didn't know this (without being too concerned about the statistical relevance of the sample size, I would estimate that about 80% of PL/SQL developers might not know this). So I decided to write this little post. Consider this piece of code: CREATE TABLE examples (sample_str VARCHAR2 (100)); INSERT INTO examples (sample_str) VALUES ('It''s the little things in life ...'); DECLARE v_stm VARCHAR2 (1000); BEGIN v_stm := 'insert into examples (sample_str) values (''It''''s the little things in life ...'')'; EXECUTE IMMEDIATE v_stm; END; Take a look at the quotation syntax. Most developers will recognize...

  Language : English Paperback : 644 pages [ 235mm x 191mm ] Release Date : June 2010 ISBN : 1847194524 ISBN 13 : 978-1-847194-52-7 Authors : Arie Geller , Matthew Lyon     In June, just before the official release of APEX 4.0 and #APEX4 Twitter messages popping up on my desktop every minute, I noticed a tweet from one of the authors of this book saying something like: “...bad timing…just released our book APEX 3.2 – Essentials and More …”. Well, I agree. Just looking at the books title, you might really think: Bad Timing. But, you should never just judge a book by its cover (or Title, in this case). Just let´s forget about APEX 4.0 for a moment. This book covers almost all aspects you probably will encounter when developing with APEX. The authors start the book explaining the concepts of APEX and explaining the “APEX Angle” of related (or required) technologies like HTML, CSS, Javascript and AJAX. Once the basics are covered, Application development ...

Apex.oracle.com has been upgraded with the 4.0 Release Candidate. Looks like the APEX team will present the official 4.0 release very soon. Without trying to “predict” the When or Where, I regret that I am not able to participate in this year´s ODTUG Kaleidoscope conference . With the upgrade, I have my first public accessible application running on version 4.0 live. I tried to combine two exciting things in life: Soccer (or football, as we say in Europe) and Oracle technology. So, if you are just as much looking forward to the upcoming FIFA South Africa World Cup 2010 and APEX 4.0, join my little predictor game: FIFAPEX . It´s free, It´s fun and you can win something: David Peake donated the book “Beginning Oracle Application Express”, written by Rick Greenwald. So, join the game, compare yourself to other enthusiast, and make chance to win and learn all about Oracle Application Express, the tool that was used to build this site. (BTW: FIFAPEX still open for sponsoring. If you...

Creating tabular forms in Apex is relative straight forward. One gets fully generated, instant insert/update/delete functionality. Unfortunately (for the form developer), tables are usually part of a more or less complex data model, which is optimized for data storage, rather then for form-layout. Well, Apex offers some possibilities to the developer to enable tabular forms beyond 1:1 table based. Collections One alternative is to create your tabular form using the Apex Collection API. There is a good article on Martin Giffy D'Souza’s blog describing this technique. This collection-approach basically pre-fetches data into a (PL/SQL) collection from a query/cursor. The “collected” data will be displayed in the form. An on-submit page process will store the data submitted from the form into the collection. After this you can perform some validation before submitting the data to table(s) in an on-submit page process. Database Views Well, I favor an approach that keeps the...