Tuesday, July 5, 2011

ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2011

Last week I returned to the Netherlands after a very strict travel schedule from Kaleidoscope 2011. Delays, heavy turbulence, running at airports and hoping to see my luggage back, made my trip back not that pleasant. Next time a direct flight to Los Angeles?


It was a week packed with sessions. For me the accent was of course on APEX. Within every slot 3 sessions to choose from, it was an intense week. Sunday was reserved for Oracle's development team. Lots of info on APEX 4.1. One of the best sessions for me that week was the session 'APEX 4 + HTML 5 = Awesome' by Martin Giffy d'Souza. Always nice to see that in various presentations 'our' APEX plugin site came along.

Always nice to catch up with all APEX minded people. With my ACE friends we had a excellent ACE dinner at a very good restaurant. The highlight of the week was the big party at the Queen Mary.

I'll hope to see everyone again in San Antonio at Kaleidoscope 2012!

Friday, May 6, 2011

Oracle APEX 4.1 Early Adopter Release 1 available

Oracle APEX 4.1 Early Adopter Release 1 is available on tryapexnow.com. One of the greatest improvements is the error handling. Since 2004 I waited for this enhancement. For Mobile Support and Data Upload we have to wait a little more.

A description of all new features is here.

Happy testing!

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Highlight current record in Interactive Report


- Create an interactive report with an ID column. On the page must be an item (Pxx_ID which holds the ID, for example an item in a form region to edit the details of a selected record, based on the same table on the same page.
- Don't define a link in the reports attribute page, but do it at the ID column. The reason is that you can't use the #ID# syntax in the link icon property.
- At the property of the link icon of the column with the ID, define the image tag with an additional attribute:  value="#ID#". When the user clicks on the link, the value of the ID must be stored in the previously defined id-item. Also define the rest of the brach logic when a user clicks on the link. 

At page level include in the 'Execute when Page Loads' property, the following jQuery javascript:

$('img[value=' + $v('Pxx_ID') +']').parents('tr:first').children('td').css('background-color','#CCFFFF');


Wednesday, November 17, 2010

APEX 4.1. A new Statement of direction


Oracle published its new statement of direction for APEX yesterday. Below the highlights with some comments.

Oracle Application Express 4.1

Oracle Application Express 4.1 will focus on enhancement to existing functionality and additional capabilities to support applications running on mobile devices. Application Express 4.1 is planned to incorporate the following:
  • Development for Mobile Applications – Include themes and HTML templates suitable for smart phones and mobile devices. 
This would be great. We already saw the iPhone template from Mark Sewtz.

  • Charting - Provide for chart rendering without using Flash (to enable display on mobile devices).
The last months we heard a lot of rumours about Flash and HTML5 initiated by Apple(?). Good to know that APEX is going to support it.

  • Error Handling - Improve error handling and user-defined exception processing.
Error handling is something which I personally was waiting for to come for many years. I emailed and talked a lot about it with the APEX team. See also my old post on the APEX forum.

  • Interactive Reporting – Allow multiple reports on one page and support pivot queries.
Multiple interactive reports is something customers often want to see. For example in a master detail page. Pivoting is also always a hassle.

  • Tabular Forms – Allow multiple tabular forms on one page and continue to expand tabular forms validations.
Also a nice feature. I think this is a lot of work for the APEX team.

  • Master-Detail-Detail – Allow the generation of pages to support master-detail-detail relationships.
Good feature. Maybe the master-detail wizard (and the new ones) could support generating all the regions on one page easier than the way it works at the moment.

  • Dynamic Actions – Enhance conditional processing and allow dynamic actions to be defined for tabular forms, reports, and buttons.
These web 2.0 features are making it to us developers much easier. I spent a lot of time making dynamic actions on buttons working (adjusting the button templates etc.).

  • Plug-Ins - Add plug-in support for additional components and enhance plug-in definitions.
 Plug-ins are potentially a very strong feature of APEX. More enhancements are welcome.

  • Use of ROWID – Allow usage of ROWID for Automatic DML processing (as an alternative to identifying the PK columns).
Just use an ID column for every table :-)

  • Modal Dialogue - Add ability to display a dialog on top of a page (the rest of the page will be grayed out).
Also something which is very welcome. We all make our own solutions now.

  • Websheets – Allow for greater control over user interface, new page section types, and enhanced spreadsheet / datagrid integration.
Websheets aren't getting much attention, but is also a powerful feature of APEX.

  • Data Upload - Enable end-users to upload data into an existing table (within an application).
Finally! I had a lot of projects in which I could have used it. We always had to build our own solutions.

  • Accessibility – Improve accessibility in existing themes and HTML templates.
  • Numerous functional and performance improvements.
 Last question: when are all these beautiful features coming?

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Pre release of APEX 4.0.2 patch set

Last Friday Joel Kallman mentioned on his blog the pre-release of the APEX 4.0.2 patch set. There are also two new themes (21 and 22) included.

Good to see the APEX team is still working hard to provide us with such a great product.

Thursday, June 24, 2010

APEX 4.0 released!

Application express 4.0 is officially released!

This is a major release with many many new features. Good timing also: just before ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010 in Washington. All the developers are of course focused on one tool during the event: APEX.

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

APEX OCP exam by the end of July?

I while ago there was some communication about an APEX OCP exam. Being curious, I wrote an email to Oracle Education and asked for the actual status. Below their reply.


Please note that the beta ended on May 15, 2010 for the Exam 1Z0-450 Oracle Application Express 3.2: Developing Web Applications and the production version of this exam will be available after 10-11 weeks from the Beta end date.
Please visit our website for more information : http://education.oracle.com/pls/web_prod-plq-dad/db_pages.getpage?page_id=41&p_exam_id=1Z0_450
Regards,
OCP Team 

It's version 3.2 they are talking about, so maybe there will be another beta ......


Happy studying!