Oracle & APEX Geekery

This article describes a solution to determine the client device category (i.e. desktop, browser or tablet) your APEX application is accessed from. Until recently, building a web application with Oracle Application Express usually meant to build a desktop browser application. But if you look at the growing number of mobile devices, this will change very soon, if not already has for some of you. Being able to develop applications, that can be accessed by tablets or smart phones offers lots of new possibilities. But it also comes with some challenges. Mobile devices are different. Interaction by touch screen, screen size and (non-) support of certain common web functionality (flash, for example), just to mention a few. Oracles announcement to integrate the jQuery mobile framework into APEX 4.2 will help us to deal with many of the challenges, developing for multiple devices will bring. Until now, one of the biggest challenges is, to determine the actual client your application ...

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...