Oracle & APEX Geekery

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...

I had some reactions on my post, describing an issue that occurred when using the DHTMLX library in combination with APEX: From Bharadwaz (Bharat) Pappu , Subject: ODTUD- Oracle APEX + DHTMLX integration Hello Christian, The presentation at APEXPOSED will be similar to the one I did at ODTUG. There is one huge change though…Instead of making changes to the .js files or the DHTMLX APIs I use a very powerful DHTMLX API to integrate it  with Oracle APEX. As promised to you earlier here is a snippet of the code that will work without changing any APEX or DHTMLX APIs: <link rel="STYLESHEET" type="text/css" href="/i/javascript/.../dhtmlxSuite/dhtmlxtree/samples/common/style.css"> <link rel="STYLESHEET" type="text/css" href="/i/javascript/.../dhtmlxSuite/dhtmlxtree/codebase/dhtmlxtree.css"> <script...

Oracle Application Express Forms Converter A migration guide using the APEX conversion utility Convert your Oracle Forms application to Oracle APEX successfully by Douwe Pieter van den Bos Packt Publishing 2009 ISBN 1847197760 ISBN 13 978-1-847197-76-4   Douwe Pieter van den Bos’s book “Oracle Application Express Forms Converter” covers all the aspects and tasks of your Forms conversion project, step-by-step, well explained and packed with screenshots. The books tutorial-like organization guides you through the whole conversion process, from planning and preparation, through conversion and customizing your application, to deploying it. If you are thinking of migrating your Oracle Forms and/or Reports to APEX, this book is a “must‑have” on your project teams reading list. Nevertheless, you will need some knowledge of Oracle Forms and APEX to make this an easy read. Instead of going into details, in some cases you will find references to the appro...

Well, another post on browser behavior. Actually it's about an Add-on. This time it's about a bug I ran into using the Firebug (current version: 1.4.3). Firebug is very popular under Apex Developers, so I thought this might interest you. Firebug actually works fine, but if you are using AJAX calls in your Apex application (or any other web application), you will notice that the AJAX call is made, response received, but not processed. I tried all the other browsers, no problems; just Firefox did not behave correctly. I had no idea. A post on Firefox Support Forum ... another week of cluelessness ... finally I got a friendly hint, directing me to this blog-post: Firefox 3.5/Firebug XMLHttpRequest and readystatechange bug " Looks like this problem is caused by Firebug and solved in the upcoming release 1.5 (currently alpha). Update 5-nov-2009: Firebug Add-in update 1.4.4 is available. I installed the update and the mentioned problem does not occur anymore. ...

When developing web applications you sometimes want to develop/test your app with different users (sessions) simultaneously and not logout-login-logout-login every time to switch. When using Internet Explorer, you might have experienced some differences in session management between IE6/7 and IE8. I found this article on MSDN Blogs, which explains the differences and helped me to configure the behavior I wanted.

Apex is using its own syntax to pass URL parameters, called the f?p syntax. In fact, there is only one standard URL search-path parameter: "p". "p" accepts a string build as: App:Page:Session:Request:Debug:ClearCache:itemNames:itemValues:PrinterFriendly I am not going to explain all the individual arguments. They should be familiar to most APEX developers. I would like to discuss the itemNames:itemValues argument pair, which allows us to pass custom parameters to our page calls. When using external libraries, like the "Yahoo! User Interface Library" (YUI) , JQuery or (in my case) DHTMLX , you might find, that the f?p syntax is not always usable with these libraries. In some cases, URL’s get assembled by those libraries dynamically, expecting the standard search-path syntax ( ?P1 =V1 &...&Pn =Vn ). I came across this problem when using the xmlLoad functionality in the DHTMLX library. This method adds an additional par...