B - APEX

Today was (again) a nice day. A sunny day with almost 20 degrees (Celsius), no clouds and just the right amount of wind. Perfect conditions to do some paragliding and after the flight, a cold beer with a friend.  But there was something else that made my day. It was something that happened in the office. Today we got a visit from a young 18 years old future student. Next year he will go to college and he is still not sure which one or which direction. But he said, he is interested in programming and that is why I invited him to visit us.  We started talking, and it went like this:  Me: Do you know Oracle or databases. Him: no Me: OK, do you know anything about APEX Him; no Me: OK, what about PL/SQL, SQL, Java, ... Him: no And I thought to my self, this is perfect! My next question was: Do you know anything about ER diagrams? The answer was...No. And I thought to my self, even better...let's try to teach him and see how fast he can learn and even more important if he will ...

Sample data sets are something that I use very often. Either I'm trying out some new features, working on a presentation, preparing a workshop,... For me still the favorite data set is the King with a salary of 5000...or in other words the SCOTT schema with a famous DEPT and EMP tables. If you have never heard about the SCOTT schema, then it must be that you are really really young :). In that case you can read more about SCOTT schema  here . And if you don't know who Scott is, then check this link . If we want to have this sample data set in our custom schema then we need a script that will create the tables along with the data. One of the places where we can get the script is for an example on Github . But if we are working with APEX all we need are a few clicks and we are good to go. Once logged into APEX we have to select in the drop down menu :  Workshop > Utilities > Sample DataSets Once this page, all we have to do is click on "Install" n...

First things first. Yes, it' has been to long since I wrote my last blog post. But you know what, it's not like I didn't had time or something like that...it was just that I lost my login credentials for blogger.com... Today I walked to the office and suddenly I remembered what my credentials are, and I also got an idea for a new blog post. Maybe it was due to the fact that it was a really nice walk...who knows :) I'm working with APEX for many years now and here and there I "discover" things that are there, I guess for ages, but somehow I have overlooked them. My last presentation that I did was "It's good to know your APEX backyard" for the APEX Alpe Adria conference . In this presentation I talked about that APEX is not only Page Designer, where we spend most of our time when working with APEX. But there is so much more then Page Designer. As part of the presentation I also covered Application Utilities and on the page with Page Utilit...

We have already migrated some of the existing applications to a new version of Oracle Application Express - 5.1. After few weeks in production I can just say...do it :). But when doing an upgrade there is always a possibility that you will hit some issues. For me one of the issue was Skillbuilders Super LOV (v3), and it looks like I'm not alone ( https://community.oracle.com/thread/4010580 ) So what is the issue?  When you select a value (Super LOV item) and try to save a form then the value is not submitted. Now if you are lucky, then your item is mandatory and you will see the error - end users will tell you right away that something is not working. If your item is not mandatory then you might see this error much later, with complaints that some data is not saved correctly. Value is selected After submit, value is cleared and we see an error After a bit of research I have found a quick fix, that you can use, until the plugin is fixed by original authors. Wh...

In Oracle Application Express it is possible to specify application-level attributes: Build Status and Application Status. With Build Status we can prevent that an application is being modified by other developers. With Application Status we can specify whether an application is available or unavailable for use. Topic of this blog post is not to talk in detail about this two attributes (if you want to know more, then check the  official documentation ), but to mention how we can use APIs to manage this attributes in Oracle Application Express 5.1 Build Status For setting build status we can use the following procedure:   apex_util.set_app_build_status(       p_application_id IN NUMBER,      p_build_status IN VARCHAR2); For p_build_status we can specify RUN_ONLY  and RUN_AND_BUILD .  More details about this API can be found here . Application Status For changing the status of the application, we can use...

With Oracle Application Express version 5.1 we are getting lots of new features. Among most notable or exposed are for sure Interactive Grids, JET Charts and Live Template Options. But we can also find some smaller (and really nice) enhancements. One of this is new look and feel of Radio Group item. We can spot this for example when we use Create New Page wizard in Page Designer: So what do we need to do, if we want to have this look and feel in our applications. Just adding combo box item to our page is not enough, it will have the same effect as in version 5.0. It will look like this : Basically we need to change three things. Number of Columns: should match number of elements in group or you can also set it to some bigger value (for example 100) Display Null Value: NO  Template Option -> Region Group Display: Display as Pill Button After this three small changes we now have new look and feel for our radio group: For me personally t...