Oracle & APEX Geekery

I promised to publish about this subject to one of the attendees during my presentation at KScope 12 in San Antonio. I used this functionality in my demo application ( FifApex ) and it seems there is interest in how to do this. Most of the public websites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Amazon or OTN do have it: an option to stay logged in, even if you closed the browser, so you do not have to authenticate each time you visit the site again. I’m pretty used to it and would be surprised if a website didn’t offer this convenient feature. OK, it’s not entirely secure, but, as I said, very convenient. I’m working on a “consumer” site/application, I’m building it with APEX and I want to offer this “remember me” option too. I knew an APEX based website that does offer this feature ( www.plsqlchallenge.com ) and I had a chat with the developer that implemented it’s login mechanism, Paul Broughton from Apex Evangelists . So, here my thanks to him for the original inspiration.   Or...

The build in jQuery UI Datepicker of Application Express is a very versatile component and it is very easy to configure the basic settings with the Page Item properties. One of the properties you can set, is the range of selectable dates by entering a Minimum and Maximum Date value. The “syntax” of these values is based on the jQuery UI Datepicker components date format capabilities, so this might be looking a bit awkward to us Oracle folks at first sight. Next to giving a static value or one of these Datepicker calculations you can reference an APEX Page Item to set the range values, which is a nice thing as we are able to calculate a range dynamically, based on some database value/calculations. The bummer is: the calculation only gets executed during the rendering phase of the page and changing the referencing Page Item’s value won’t change the Datepicker range. What you really want (yes, you do), is to be able to reference Page Items to control the Minimum and Maximum Date dynamica...

Tags van Technorati: apex , dynamic action , tabular form , add row , focus , cursor I just got the question from a fellow developer, how to focus the cursor to the first input field of a newly added row using the ADD button in a standard APEX Tabular Form. Actually, I would expect APEX to do this automagically. But it doesn’t. To implement this behavior is actually really simple.     For this example I create a simple tabular form based on the demo_customers table: This is what the form looks like when you click the “Add Row” button. As you can see, none of the input field has focus at this time. To focus the cursor on the first field of the new row (Cust First Name), I somehow have to change the behavior of the “Add Row” button. Let’s have a look at it’s definition: The click-action of the button is actually a JavaScript call: addRow();. Naturally I want to keep this action, but after this, I want to start an additional action that should set the focus to the input f...

When working with APEX you certainly want to use the APEX Listener. It’s a great piece of software and Oracle is committed to extend its functionality (Oracle recently release the beta version of the new APEX Listener 2.0 ). When installing the APEX Listener, you basically have two choices: run APEX Listener “Standalone” deploy the Listeners WAR file to one of the supported webservers The problem (at least, my problem): when using the APEX Listener on my laptop/desktop with my local APEX instance, I do not want to set up a whole webserver, just to be able to develop APEX applications. So I,’m choosing the lightweight option: Standalone! But the annoying thing about the standalone installation is, that I have to start the APEX Listener from the command line each time I want it to be available. It just would be so much easier to just have it as a Windows service, stating during system boot. Seems that an APEX developer from Poland, Andrzej Nowakowski , solved this problem for us and...

Tonight (CET) the European Football Championship kicks off. As with every EURO or World Championship I’m organizing a predicting game where you (Yes, you too!) can bet on match results FifApex . And again, the website is build with Oracle Application Express. New this year: I created a mobile version of FifApex ( m.fifapex.net ) with APEX and the jQuery Mobile framework. If you want to know how I’ve done this, come visit my presentation at the ODTUG KScope12 conference in San Antonio, Texas , end of this month. Meanwhile, register for FifApex, enter our predictions, and maybe you will be one of the winners of the prizes …     BTW: if you missed the first games: you still can enter the competition AND, from my experience, I can tell you: there is not a lot football/soccer knowledge required for a good ranking ;-).

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 ...

Yesterdays OGh APEX day in Zeist (NL) was a great success. The probably largest APEX-only congress (almost 300 APEX enthusiasts) was packed with 3 parallel tracks of presentations covering a wide variety of APEX related subjects. The OGh organization committee again managed to invite well known APEX experts as speakers: Dimitri Gielis and John Scott (the dynamic APEX Evangelists Duo), Roel Hartman, Alex Nuijten, Patrick Barel (all ACE or ACED so far). Iloon Ellen Wolff, from Oracle NL, gave us some previews on Oracle’s Cloud Service, mostly slides and video’s. A live demo wasn’t possible, because there is something going on at Oracle and we may can expect some exciting news very soon. The highlight, in my eyes, was Patrick Wolf’s keynote presentation, talking about the recent enhancements of 4.1.1,and, much more exciting, giving us a glimpse of what will come in the long awaited 4.2 upgrade. After showing the usual “Oracle Save Harbor Statement” the conference participants wer...