Oracle & APEX Geekery

My first ODTUG Kaleidoscope conference was Monterey in 2009. I was very impressed with the speaker lineup and managed to convince my manager to fund trip and conference. The conference was great in every aspect: Lots of good quality sessions, perfect food and lots of people to talk too. What I like most about KScope: it’s all focused on us developers; making us feel comfortable and creating an atmosphere, almost like you are a part of one big family. Speakers, fellow developers, Oracle development teams, everybody comes for the same reason: share knowledge. I was so impressed with the conference format and got to meet so many people, I decided to come back again. Another thing I learned: Being an Oracle developer for many years, I too have knowledge, people are interested in hearing and learning from. When the Call-for-Papers for KScope 10 was opened a few months later, I submitted 2 abstract. Unfortunately these didn’t get accepted and being busy starting up my own business in 2010,...

A while ago, at KScope 14 in New Orleans, I presented on Responsive Web Design with APEX Theme 25. One of the topics of my presentation was the lack of responsiveness of standard reports in Oracle Application Express. Meanwhile there were several attempts/solutions to make Theme 25 reports more responsive. One approach is to add custom CSS code for those columns to hide on specific device sizes, using @media queries: Major disadvantage of this approach is, that the user is getting less information on smaller devices. Instead of just hiding the data, it would be much nicer to present the data in a different, appropriate way, like rearranging the data in a fashion it fit on the small screen and/or displaying it optionally (on user demand). One technique to realize this is called “ Reflow Tables ”. A reflow table works by collapsing the table columns into a stacked presentation that looks like blocks of label/data pairs for each row. One particular nice implementation of t...